The First Space War
by DrCyrusBortel
Summary: Earth inches towards world war. High above the amassing armies, agents and ship captains must contest control of the final frontier. Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars", cranked up to an 11. Kim Possible style. AU. Also contains characters from Phineas and Ferb and Atomic Betty.
1. Poking the Bear

This author does not own the Atomic Betty or Kim Possible franchises. This story was written for personal amusement. Chapters initially alternate between the points-of-view of KP and Atomic Betty.

* * *

Opening Crawl

In October 1984, crisis brews once again between the capitalist JOINT GOVERNMENT (JOINTGOV) and the communist UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (SOVIET UNION).

Tensions, already high over the deployment of the STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (STAR WARS) space-based ballistic missile defenses by the JOINT GOVERNMENT, escalate wildly over the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and high-energy laser missile defenses in Western Europe.

With the ultranationalist western-aligned CZECH REPUBLIC fomenting unrest in the PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF SLOVAKIA, the SOVIET UNION, mired in economic stagnation and fearful of a JOINTGOV first strike, mobilizes for for an invasion of WESTERN EUROPE.

Even as events unfold on the ground, the SOVIET STRATEGIC ROCKET FORCES make their move in space, mobilizing spacecraft to shadow JOINTGOV's nuclear pulse propelled space battleships – one of the guarantors of JOINTGOV's all-important strategic nuclear deterrent. Elsewhere, SOVIET forces deploy to threaten JOINTGOV infrastructure and industry in HIGH EARTH ORBIT.

In high orbit, distant from the developing situation on Earth, STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND Major Betty Barret, commander of the frigate JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu (Iron Fan Princess, 鐵扇公主, tee-yeah sh-ahn gong zhu), approaches a SOVIET orbital complex…

* * *

1: Poking the Bear

October 6th, 1984

Halo orbit, Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

The JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu (Iron Fan Princess) drifted noiselessly through space, tumbling end-over-end to generate a measly 0.1 gees of gravity for her crew.

Like all nuclear thermal rockets, the Tieshan Gongzhu was shaped like a baton.

At one end was a 20-gigawatt HappyAtom liquid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. At the other was a small cylindrical habitat module. In between the two, putting thirty meters of distance between the crew and the highly radioactive rocket engine, was a narrow square truss.

Near the rocket engine, clustered around the truss, were two cylindrical propellant tanks – each heavier than the entire spacecraft. Atop the habitat module, crowning the spacecraft, was a reentry capsule shaped like an overturned pail.

Just below the habitat module, clustered around the truss like the leaves and thorns of a rose, were a gaggle of flat panels, bullet-shaped protrusions, and hexagonal pods. The ship's raison d'etre, the phased-array-radars, free-electron laser turret, autocannon, and missile pods marked the ship as a military vessel.

The indigo helium-atom-flag (a.k.a. the "ring and thing"), the JGAF insignia, and the brightly-colored nose art on the white surface of the habitat module marked the ship as belonging to Strategic Air Command.

Methane-oxygen thrusters fired, and the ship's rotation ground to a halt.

Major Betty Barrett, commander and WSO of the Tieshan Gongzhu, shook her head as the sensation of free-fall returned, accidentally spreading her red hair into a fan. She tied it back into a ponytail with practiced efficiency.

Her pilot, Lieutenant Sparky Tong, continued his report with typical enthusiasm.

"De-spin complete. We have freefall. All systems green. Permission to close with the target, Major?"

Betty nodded. "Permission granted, Lieutenant Tong. Let's give those Reds a little knock."

Sparky grinned.

"Attention all passengers! We will be performing a burn shortly! Please return your chairs to combat positions and make sure your tray tables are stowed!"

Lieutenant Noah Parker groaned at the pilot's joke. Having graduated with a degree in astronomy from the University of Luna, the Caucasian was no stranger to the unique Lunan sense of humor. However, his last deployment (a presence rendezvous with the near-earth asteroid mine 10569 Nugget) had forced him to spend over a year (in a 600m^3 Kevlar balloon) with the obnoxious Lunan, and even six months at home had failed to dampen his irritation towards Sparky.

Noah's chair tilted one hundred and twenty degrees, bringing him to rest in front of his console.

Such were the disadvantages of the 'tumbling pigeon' configuration of the Tieshan Gongzhu. With the direction of spin gravity exactly opposite that of thrust gravity, instruments designed for use under thrust were difficult to access while under spin, and chairs had to tilt to orient their users properly during transitions between the two.

Sparky continued his announcement. "All hands, prepare for acceleration! 3… 2… 1… Burn! Yee-haw!"

The control drums of the liquid-core reactor at the spacecraft's base rotated, increasing the neutron flux within the reactor and the rate of the fission reactions within. Heat was produced in enormous amounts, rapidly melting the congealed uranium…

…and superheating water into gas and plasma, which shot out the back of the spacecraft at more than ten kilometers per second.

As the reactor cycled to full power, Lieutenant Paloma Ramirez, shipboard engineer, began performing the standard reactor-start checklist. All the while, her hand hovered over the reactor cutoff switch, ready to abort the burn at the first hint of trouble.

"Reactor: Core temperature normal. Core viscosity normal. Propellant flow normal. Exhaust velocity normal. Neutron flux normal. Xenon outgassing normal. Power: Turbine output power normal. Radiator temperature normal. Structure: Loading normal. Temperature normal. Tank loading normal. Tank slosh normal. Tank pressure normal. Checklist complete. Our burn looks good, Major."

The black Hispanic stole a glance at Sparky. Used to the 0.16g of the Lunar surface, the Lunan was breathing deeply in and out to cope with the comparatively slight acceleration of 0.66g – a sight which never failed to bring a smile to her face.

While not much compared to liftoff rockets (which often generated 3-5g of acceleration), 0.66g was plenty for a deep space craft like the Tieshan Gongzhu. To achieve even this seemingly low level of acceleration, the truck-sized reactor generated an thrust power of twenty gigawatts – equivalent to the maximum power output of the Three Gorges Dam, two Manhattan-sized Solar Power Satellites, or twenty commercial nuclear reactors.

Government advertisements encouraging space colonization extolled the riches, grandeur and destiny of the final frontier. To a lesser extent, it extolled the superb character of the final frontiersman and his space society. It was said that living in space turned people into instinctive physicists, compulsive safety-conscious engineers, and hardworking pragmatists. Dependent on advanced technology for their survival, the people of the final frontier would always place technological development, technical education, and infrastructure at the forefront of their needs. This would allow them to perpetuate the virtuous cycle of science, technology, and engineering (the STEM cycle) and industrial-technological civilization all the way to the stars - no matter what horrible fate befell Earth.

The reality was not too far off the mark, but Lunans like Sparky were, at their core, human, with human quirks and personalities. Sometimes obnoxious ones, Paloma thought with a chuckle.

"Burn ends in five, four, three, two, one. Main engine cutoff. We have freefall."

Sparky compared his trajectory with the flight plan. "Trajectory perfect!"

Noah, grinning, spoke up. "Major, we've got a message on the International band! The Soviets are saying that our trajectory will take us through their engagement zone, and that they have authorization to shoot down anything that passes through it."

Betty laughed. "Maintain radio silence. Deploying drones."

Betty turned to her station's CRT (cathode-ray-tube screen). As commander of the spacecraft, Betty was also Weapons Systems Officer – a practice inherited from Strategic Air Command's fighter-bomber force.

She clicked a switch, and three stealth drones fell away from the Tieshan Gongzhu.

The oddly-shaped angular prisms were coated in a layer of radar-absorbent substance so seamless that the designers had not included a power umbilical. Instead, a small, 5-watt radioisotope thermal generator provided startup and boot-up power until the spacecraft could obtain power from the radar-absorbent-covered, super-black, lidar-absorbing solar arrays. Chilled to a few degrees above absolute zero by liquid hydrogen and powered by cold gas thrusters, the drones were very difficult to spot on infra-red.

They also had to be serviced every few months, and cost a small fortune, but someone had decided that it was a price worth paying.

Betty clicked another switch, and three brightly colored, decidedly un-stealthy drones rocketed away from the ship.

All were on course for the Soviet industrial complex at Earth-Moon Lagrange 1.

Noah's gaze shifted from his armrest-mounted CRT (cathode-ray-tube) monitor to his main console. The highly magnified image of the Soviet EML1 industrial complex filled the main screen. Like any other space factory, it was a mess of wiry support beams, industrial & hab modules, volatiles storage balloons, solar furnaces, and solar panels – a structure that could exist only in a zero-gee environment.

Like JOINTGOV's (substantially larger) operations in EML1, the Soviet EML1 complex processed all manner of lunar and asteroidal feedstocks into advanced composites, superalloys, carbon-oxygen fuel cells, and other zero-gee products essential for Soviet industry.

The space factories of both sides would thus be prime targets in any major space war. As such, both sides had invested in fixed defenses and defensive spacecraft.

Noah turned his attention to a host of graphs, indicators, and symbols which collectively represented the Soviet space station's emissions profile, that is, the electronic and thermal signals given off by the complex's radar, lidar, and communications systems. As a civilian installation with minimal emissions control, or EMCON, there was a plethora of data to analyse, most of it worthless.

It fell to the Tieshan Gongzhu's X-5 intelligence processing computer to separate the intelligence from the chaff.

While unable to understand speech or writing, responsive only to highly specific commands, and capable only of performing a limited set of functions, the X-5 computer was an artificial intelligence in every sense of the word. It could recognize patterns, learn new ones, and even make guesses.

(Laymen's expectations for AI had, unfortunately, been set by landmark works of science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot, rather than the more mundane reality of search engines and map route-planning programs)

The X-5 unit highlighted a particular data stream – the complex's civilian microwave link with Moscow. 'Increased activity', the caption read. Noah (having learnt Russian at the behest of the Air Force) clicked onto it, and began listening.

"…are doing it again. If they don't burn again, they'll pass within five kilometers of us."

The X-5 unit then highlighted another signal – an encrypted low probability of intercept (LPI) radio transmission, hopping across thousands of frequencies and broadcasting at low power on multiple bands. That X-5 had managed to lock onto the signal was a testament to JOINTGOV engineering prowess equaling the Powersat program. The caption read 'New activity'.

"Major, I am pleased to announce that we have poked the bear! We have chatter!"

Paloma whooped, and Betty nodded.

"Let's serve up the usual, boys. If we can get them to shoot our drones, I'm buying us all dinner when we get back to El-One."

Noah returned his attention to his instruments, hoping that X-5 would pick up Soviet fire control radars. Such electronic intelligence, or ELINT, would improve the ability of SAC to jam, spoof, or detect enemy radar, perhaps giving SAC the decisive edge in a future war.

It would also indicate that the enemy was scared out of their wits and ready to shoot down the Tieshan Gongzhu. Regarding the former, PSYOPS (or psychological warfare operations) was half the point of these provocations, and as for the latter, Noah and X-5 had a few electronic tricks up their sleeves…

X-5 highlighted the encrypted LPI radio. "Prolonged activity. Enemy response likely.", the caption read.

X-5 suddenly beeped. It had detected 'leaky' longwave radios, used for communication between space station modules. 'Enemy response imminent', read the caption.

Noah turned to his commander. "Major! Enemy chatter's gone through the roof! We've got action!"

Paloma, eyes glued to the infra-red image of the Soviet complex, yelled. "A reactor just went hot!"

Betty withdrew the safety interlocks on the UV laser and caseless autocannon. "Point-defense is armed. Pilot, maintain course but prepare for evasive maneuvers. Noah, ready electronic countermeasures."

Noah picked a setting – not his best, since its use would allow it to be analyzed by his Soviet counterparts – and slaved it to the big red button.

Betty inhaled. Every second her ship stayed in Soviet engagement zones increased the electronic intelligence gathered – but increased the risk that her ship and crew would be shot out of the star-studded sky. And she alone could decide when to bug out.

X-5 beeped. "Yes! LPI fire control radar! Jamming… Jammed!" Noah raised an eyebrow as chatter spiked again, and, acting on instinct, jammed that too.

Paloma hollered. "Defocused laser! Warning shot!"

Betty's eyes went wide. The Soviets had gotten better at the handoff from radar to telescope.

She decided. "Sparky, get us out of here!"

Methane-oxygen thrusters fired, the main reactor cycled up, and, a few jinks later, the Tieshan Gongzhu began accelerating through the Soviet engagement zone.

Betty clicked a switch, and the three non-stealthy probes (lost in the ECM and ignored by enemy telescopes in the mad dash) ignited their main engines, raising alarms in the Soviet command center.

Lasers turned towards the new threat, stabbed skywards… and revealed their response times, wavelengths, and accuracies to Noah and X-5.

As the Tieshan Gongzhu exited of the Soviet engagement zone (the Soviets having elected not to unleash missiles on her), Betty checked the status of the stealth drones, smiled, and tapped a key.

Two thousand kilometers distant from the station, on the Tieshan Gongzhu's original heading, three stealth drones exploded into rapidly expanding clouds of mostly-incinerated shrapnel, shocking the Soviets, who had been under the impression that they had shot down all of the drones.

The message was clear. If it had so desired, the Tieshan Gongzhu could have killed the Soviet space platform. And there was nothing the Soviets could have done about it.

* * *

 _A crew-cut balding man in the uniform of a JGAF Colonel walks onscreen, pointy stick in hand and blackboard behind. He begins speaking in a flat, but authoritative, monotone, in the mid-Atlantic accent so popular with 1960s instructional videos._

 _Space is big. Ridiculously big. The enormity of space is awe-inspiring, humbling, and alluring. Regardless, the vastness of the cosmos is not the subject of this video._

 _The cradle of mankind, the Earth-Moon system, encompasses a circle four hundred thousand kilometers in radius, The Earth is at the center of this circle, and the Moon's orbit traces out the circumference._

 _For comparison, this is thirty times Earth's diameter of twelve thousand kilometers, and one hundred times the Moon's diameter of three-thousand five hundred kilometers._

 _This is still within the grasp of human imagination. At subsonic airliner speeds, it would take you two weeks to reach the moon. At the speed of a sedan, it would take you six months._

 _If the circle of the Moon's orbit were solid, the area of one side would be 500 billion square kilometers. By comparison, the Pacific Ocean covers an area of 160 million square kilometers. It would take 3,000 Pacific Oceans to cover the circle – a square with fifty-five Pacific oceans on each side._

 _Objects can orbit in any plane – not just that of the moon, but also over the poles of the Earth. This expands cis-lunar space into a giant sphere._

 _This vast expanse is the main theater of operations of the Strategic Air Command Space Operations Group, which has been tasked by the Joint Government to secure our interests in the infinite celestial heavens._

 _This expanse, while empty, is not devoid of "terrain". Certain orbits hold greater significance than others._

 _Closest to Earth is Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Less than two thousand kilometers from the surface, reconnaissance satellites, space hotels, and tactical weapons platforms in Low Earth Orbits circumnavigate the Earth in ninety minutes. Passengers and munitions can fall to Earth in mere minutes. These regions are vulnerable to attack from terrestrial anti-satellite weapons._

 _At a precise altitude of 35,000 kilometers above the Earth, a spacecraft in a circular orbit takes precisely one day to orbit Earth. This is Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), home to communications platforms, astronomical platforms, and by the end of this decade, Solar Power Satellites._

 _Between GEO and LEO is Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO. This region is home to our Global Positioning Satellites._

 _Beyond GEO is High Earth Orbit, or HEO. Stretching beyond the orbit of the Moon, HEO constitutes the majority of cis-lunar space. HEO orbits can take months to complete. In this region, one can find strategic weapons platforms, space factories using lunar or asteroidal raw materials, and the Solar Power Satellite Construction Platform._

 _At the edge of cis-lunar space is the Moon and the libation points. The gravity of the Earth and Moon "balance out" at the libation points. This description – "balancing out" - is inaccurate and the actual relationship is more complex. Nonetheless, I will not delve into the details._

 _In any case, objects placed at or around the libation points are dragged along by the gravity of the Earth-Moon system, and remain stationary relative to the Earth and Moon as the Moon orbits Earth. There are five libation points._

 _Three lie on a line joining Earth and the Moon. The one between Earth and the Moon is L1, home to a large aggregation of space factories and spacecraft maintenance facilities. The one beyond the Moon is L2, home to astronomy facilities and mass catchers. The one 180 degrees ahead of the moon, opposite to it, is L3, home to a communications relay._

 _The remaining two libation points lie on the circle of the Moon's orbit. L4 is sixty degrees ahead of the Moon, L5 is sixty degrees behind. They are currently unoccupied but for a few astronomy platforms and communications relays._

 _T_ _he task before us is daunting. In World War II, the great fleet of Admiral Nimitz fought over less than half of the Pacific. Nimitz's unparalleled ability to project power and wage war over this vast region was hailed at the time as a triumph of logistics._

 _The Strategic Air Command must project power over an expanse millions of times greater, with fewer men and a more restricted budget._

 _The Strategic Air Command has one advantage over the Navy of Nimitz. Space, by definition, is empty, and thus fully transparent. There is no weather in space. No clouds can obscure enemy fleets. The heat given off by shivering crewmen can be seen from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away by sensitive digital telescopes. Only small and cold objects are missed – and even those will heat up under the sun's harsh rays._

 _This greatly simplifies the problem of finding the enemy, and renders strategies of subterfuge impotent and obsolete._

 _Excerpt, "Video Introduction to the SAC Space Operations Group", published by the Joint Government Air Force in 1971_

* * *

October 6th, 1984

Asteroid Recovery Consortium (ARC) Extraction and Refining Facility

JOINTGOV Lagrange 5 Industrial Complex

Lissajous Orbit, Earth-Moon Lagrange 5

To many a strategist's lament, stealth is near-impossible in space.

Stealth was certainly impossible for the Yulius Fuchik, a 100-tonne ion tug (technically an electric-plasma tug) sporting a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor.

As a matter of fact, the fifty megawatts of waste heat from the reactor could have been spotted by telescope on Pluto.

Even if the reactor had been off (which it was not), the 2400 metric tons of cargo strapped to the Yulius Fuchik reflected enough sunlight that the spacecraft was visible to most amateur astronomers.

Oh, and the spacecraft transponder was helpfully broadcasting the Yulius Fuchik's exact position, trajectory, and status to the entire solar system.

The Yulius Fuchik had filed its flight plan three months in advance to every Space Traffic Control organization in cis-lunar space. So far, it had followed its flight plan to the letter. It had spiraled up from LEO with food and spare parts for the Soviet L1 facility, and then made best speed to the JOINTGOV L5 facility to pick up a cargo of volatiles (purchased by the Soviets at great expense with scare hard currency). Now, it was finishing the last leg of its journey: shipping back to L1 to fill that facility's giant tanks. With the change in velocity required being only a few hundred meters per second, it would reach L1 within a week or two.

As a result, the Yulius Fuchik went completely unremarked and unnoticed by the men and women of Strategic Air Command's Chongqing Underground Complex, who were, by and large, completely preoccupied with the massive Soviet redeployments across cis-lunar space.

Which was a pity; careful analysis of its trajectory and thrust would have revealed that the Yulius Fuchik was now twenty tonnes lighter than it should have been.

* * *

 _Real World: In reality, the US conducted a series of intentionally provocative operations against Soviet installations during the early '80. Using sophisticated electronic countermeasures, USAF and Navy aircraft penetrated deep into Soviet airspace undetected, even conducting mock bombing runs against Soviet installations in Kamchatka. The demonstrable ability of the US to use ECM and other measures to evade Soviet defenses scared the willies out of the Soviets, and the immense pressure on local commanders to shoot down intruding American reconnaissance aircraft contributed to the shootdown of KAL 007 over Kamchatka in '83._


	2. Unreasonable Search and Seizure

October 7th, 1984

Unregistered Children of the Moon compound

Oceanus Procellarum, Luna

The asteroid boom of the '70s had hit Luna hard. Magnetic accelerators, actual concentrated ore bodies, and vast demand had kept the cities going, but smaller mining outposts and private settlements reliant on ALOX lifters had gone bust in alarming numbers.

The localized recessions had not quite been cushioned by the Powersat Program and the rapid growth of the overall space economy.

Add that to a jobs market flooded with many of the Joint Government's brightest (thanks to an ongoing colonization effort) and you had a recipe for discontent, especially among second-generation Lunans of military age.

Discontent manifested itself in the ways it had since the Shang dynasty overthrew the Xia in 1600 BC. First calls for change, politicking, and "peaceful" protests. After that, terrorism, assassinations, and rioting. And finally, open revolt, revolution, and civil wars which killed up to two-thirds of the population.

The second and third parts had yet to happen here, and it was the job of the Unified Security Service (USS) to make sure that they did not occur.

The job was especially critical on Luna, where a riot that got to environmental control could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Special Agent Kimberly A. Possible, Unified Security Service, reminded herself of that as she tried to focus on the view of the compound through her helmet-optimized night-vision binoculars. Three feet away, her longtime partner and friend, Special Agent Ronald D. Stoppable, continued blabbering on about how much better he could prepare yeast extract than the Lunans, whose cuisine he was colorfully disparaging.

"…and bugs! Who the heck eats bugs except maybe those guys from Beijing? They put bugs in a perfectly good dumpling! They mix bug parts with normal foods, which means their normal foods become inedible!"

"Ron, shush."

"It's not like anyone can hear us without air…"

"Ron, I can hear you. Shush or get off the line."

Ron rolled his eyes. Kim rolled hers back, and continued to survey the Children of the Moon compound. If the rumors were accurate, somewhere amidst the several regolith-covered converted propellant tanks was a cache of illegal explosives and weapons. The regional USS office had tasked Kim to sneak into the compound, determine whether the enemy had acquired weapons, and place explosives in strategic locations to rip the compound to shreds if the follow-up raid went south.

"Kim, the ground's freezing. Can we get up yet?"

"Ron, stay down. Okay. No vehicles, only three buildings heated… looks like nobody's home. Follow my lead."

Kim crouched down, and, keeping her profile low, darted forward to a boulder ahead. Her skintight elastic suit – which used elastic force to counterbalance her body's internal pressure – offered minimal protection against radiation and enemy fire, required pre-breathing, and took forever to don and doff, but it was agile, lightweight, and compact.

It also looked a lot better (at least to her eyes) than the bug-like hardsuits and semi-rigid suits preferred by Marines and space workers.

Kim and Ron crept up to the first module, a converted shuttle external tank, and approached an airlock jutting from the grey dirt that covered the humble dwelling. Kim pulled off the keycard access panel, plugged a small computer into it, overrode the lock, and yanked the airlock door open.

The airlock cycled, and Kim and Ron entered the darkened module, guns drawn. They raced through the modules, checking that they were clear one after another. At every corner and airtight door, Kim tensed, fearing that she would turn the corner to find a group of armed hostiles.

There were none. Ron looked questioningly at Kim. "Sniffer?"

Kim nodded, and pulled a chemicals sniffer from her pocket. The sniffer blinked yellow.

"Oxyliquit, Semtex, bound HMX and... gunpowder?"

The first item was innocuous. Mixtures of metal powders and liquid oxygen were the standard explosive mixes (and rocket fuels) on hydrogen and nitrogen-poor Luna. Semtex and bound HMX were common military explosives. Since Kim and Ron only had HMX on them, the Children of the Moon were definitely hiding something.

The last item was puzzling. Who would go to the trouble of importing traditional ammunition with shell casings to the moon, when caseless ammunition weighed half as much and packed double the punch?

A more thorough search of the facility turned up a small, unconcealed weapons pit, buried amongst tools and equipment in a cramped workshop. Blocky M29s caseless assault rifles (JOINTGOV copies of the German G11), M31 rocket-bullet rifles, grenades, and a stash of military explosives. Evidently, the Children of the Moon had not been expecting an unannounced search. As Kim finished placing the charges on a brightly-lit module filled with hydroponic troughs of tomato plants, a bloodcurdling scream went off in her earpiece.

She ran into the adjacent module (a darkened storeroom of some sort), pistol drawn. Ron was standing on one leg atop a crate, finger pointed at a large rat.

"Ron, it's just a rat."

"What are rats doing on the moon?"

"Rats have been hitching rides on ships ever since humans started building 'em."

The rat scurried into a notch in the floor paneling.

"Ron. Does that look like a door to you?"

Ron nodded, but took no action.

Kim, hands on her hips, groaned. "Okay, if you don't want to touch the rat, then I'll open it."

Kim threw open the door with a grunt – it was heavier and thicker than she had expected – and light poured out from a secret deck below.

Six men and two women in unmarked black uniforms stopped their conversation – Kim couldn't hear anything through her helmet – and reached for boxy assault rifles or holstered pistols.

On instinct, Ron pushed Kim out of the way. Kim's helmet hit the deck with a thud as bullet holes pockmarked the metal skin of the module. For an instant, Kim wondered why the module had not depressurized – then remembered the two meters of regolith covering each module.

Kim pushed the switch on her remote, six explosions went off, and the damaged roofs of three modules caved in under the weight of regolith they could no longer support.

Kim heard a ghastly noise, and a howling wind dragged her a few meters across the floor. A Caucasian, seemingly undeterred by the maelstrom, tripped out the hidden chamber.

Kim dropped him with a barrage of poorly-aimed shots from her pistol.

The room fell completely silent as the last of the air left it.

Kim, a few meters from where she had fallen, stood, and yanked Ron to his feet.

Ron started to run towards the hole. She held him back, and started counting.

"…fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty."

Then, and only then, did Kim poke her head over the lip of the trapdoor to the brightly lit floor below.

Eight bodies lay still. "Ron, check the room for contraband. I'll check the bodies."

None of the uniforms had any insignia on them. The hardsuits were of Japanese manufacture.

The maps, however, were in Russian.

Ron's voice was hesitant. "Uhh… Kim? Overwatch just called. Backup's en route."

Kim turned towards Ron. "Tell them we may have found Soviet personnel on-site."


	3. Drums of War

_After the enemy has been found, we must close with him if we are to do battle. To this end, Strategic Air Command possesses a wide variety of rocket engines:_

 _Electric engines and plasma engines use electricity to heat and/or accelerate mass to propel spacecraft. They are most efficient, but produce very little thrust. Spacecraft using them cannot change course quickly. This is an obvious liability in a combat spacecraft. SAC uses them primarily for resupply and logistics craft._

 _Chemical rockets burn chemicals to produce hot gas, which is expelled to propel spacecraft. They produce good thrust, are relatively simple, and are cheap. However, they are very inefficient. They are used on personnel tugs and missiles._

 _Nuclear thermal rockets use the Power of the Atom to heat water or hydrogen directly, causing them to be expelled at high temperature to propel spacecraft. They provide good thrust and are reasonably efficient. However, they are relatively expensive and will not be used on missiles for the foreseeable future. Patrol craft and light combat spacecraft employ nuclear thermal rockets._

 _Nuclear pulse propulsion employs nuclear explosives detonating behind a shock absorber to propel spacecraft forward. Nuclear pulse propulsion is very powerful. Very high thrusts and very high efficiencies can be achieved. Nuclear pulse propulsion is used on the Strategic Air Command's battleships and cruisers._

 _Excerpt, "Video Introduction to the SAC Space Operations Group", produced by the Joint Government Air Force in 1971  
_

 _*Author's note: "Nuclear pulse propulsion" is better known as Project Orion._

* * *

October 8th, 1984

FROM: GEN. SALLY FORTH, CINCSAC

TO: THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE

RE: EMERGENCY REPORT: MOBILIZATION OF SOVIET STRATEGIC ROCKET FORCES

Since the growing unrest in Slovakia and the border skirmish in Yugoslavia, Soviet forces in Eastern Europe have been placed on high alert. Notably, the Central Group of Soviet Forces and the Southern Group of Soviet Forces exhibit unusual levels of activity, and have taken center stage in the developing crisis.

Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces too have been placed on high alert. However, in addition to heightened alert conditions, the RSVN has also begun redeploying across cis-lunar space in a manner consistent with preparations for war.

Recent POINTY STICK missions have detected an increase in signal traffic between Soviet installations and ships in high orbit and Soviet alternative command posts in the Urals. Such traffic has only previously been detected during major Soviet exercises, and indicates that the Soviets view the developing situation as grave. Furthermore, Soviet forces have also been unusually consultative with said alternative command posts before responding to POINTY STICK incursions, and have displayed unusual restraint. POINTY STICK incursions which previously would have resulted in the loss of crew and spacecraft have recently resulted in our spacecraft making clean getaways.

Over the past three weeks the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces have launched no fewer than eighty large payloads into Earth orbit, triple their usual traffic. They have increasingly drawn on ageing Lenin (N-1), Proton and Soyuz boosters. Imagery intelligence of the Soviet complex at EML1 has revealed a dramatic drawdown in Soviet reserves of liquid hydrogen, and Soviet fixed patrols around their orbital complexes have diminished to almost nothing.

Much of the striking power of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Fleet has been redeployed along orbital paths which may intersect with our industrial facilities and lunar colonies. The remaining ships appear to be conducting regular monitoring and patrol duties at elevated intensity, including shadowing the Nuclear Pulse Battleships of our Deep Space Deterrent Force.

The Soviets claim that the additional traffic is in preparation for the upcoming insertion of asteroid 1967AD1 into Earth-Moon Lagrange-5. Scheduled for November, the asteroid insertion (by the JOINTGOV-based Asteroid Recovery Consortium) will involve the detonation of over 100 multimegaton shaped nuclear charges to place the 10-million-tonne asteroid in L5 after a double lunar gravity assist.

It is possible that the Soviets are conducting a fleet exercise to scout our installation at L5 before this event. A more worrying possibility, however, is that the Soviets are positioning their forces for a major space operation against the Joint Government.

* * *

October 9th, 1984

SOVIET SPIES CAUGHT NEAR CZECH LASER CONSTRUCTION SITE

JOINTGOV RECONAISSANCE AIRCRAFT SHOT DOWN OVER INTER-GERMAN BORDER

"THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION" GROSSES Cr100 MILLION IN CHINESE OPENING WEEKEND

* * *

October 10th, 1984

FROM: GEN. SALLY FORTH, CINCSAC

TO: ALL SPACECRAFT COMMANDERS

As of now, 0100 hours GMT, as a result of the ongoing crisis in Central Europe, Strategic Air Command has been ordered to DEFCON 2. The Deep Space Deterrent Fleet is accordingly to be placed on maneuvers, and all spacecraft are reminded to maintain EMCON condition GOOSEBERRY and Point-Defense condition MELON.

The rest of the armed forces have already been placed on DEFCON 3.

Deployment orders for individual ships to follow:

* * *

 _June 1972_

 _JGAF Moose Jaw_

 _Saskatchewan Province, North American Administrative Area_

 _Elizabeth "Betty" Barrett whooped and cheered as the five F-21 Swallows (fresh off the production line), gaudily painted in Indigo, Gold, and White, performed a 180-degree loop-de-loop – without breaking formation - over the tarmac of the base, before disappearing back into the clear blue sky._

 _Quincy Barrett joined in the clapping. Betty, noticing her father's reaction, turned towards her dad._

 _"_ _Isn't it awesome, Dad? I told you it would be worth it!"_

 _Quincy Barrett nodded, and turned his attention back to the Blue Dragons demonstration team._

 _Suddenly, from amidst the temporary viewing stands, a flare shot skywards, and carefully hidden protest placards were raised to the sky._

 _"_ _ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, WE DON'T WANT YOUR FRICKKIN' WAR! FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, SMASH THE TECHNOCRATIC STATE!"_

 _"_ _DOWN WITH THE AIR FORCE! DOWN WITH THE ROCK-DROPPERS! KILL THE BABY BOMBERS! FREE NORTH AMERICA!"_

 _Quincy Barrett turned to his daughter. "Sweetie, we should go."_

 _Betty frowned. "Dad! The show's not over yet!"_

 _Quincy Barrett pointed to the protesters, who were already beginning to argue with bystanders. Pushing, shoving and punching would soon follow._

 _Betty began to grumble, but grudgingly followed her dad out of the stadium._

* * *

10th October 1984

High Earth Orbit

"Major, wake up! SAC's been ordered to DEFCON 2!"

Betty opened her eyes. Instead of her father's face, the dark-skinned visage of Lieutenant Ramirez stared back at her. She rolled herself out of her bunk, fell slowly to the deck, and, sufficiently awoken by the mild jolt, stood.

"Has the Valentina made a move?"

Paloma shook her head.

Betty sighed with relief. If the Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet missile destroyer the Tieshan Gongzhu had been tailing (from the comforting distance of ten thousand kilometers) for the last day or so, had decided to attack while the Tieshan Gongzhu was still under spin…

"What the heck happened this time?"

Paloma frowned. "We caught a Soviet Spetsnaz team trying to infiltrate the laser construction site in the Czech Republic. It's all over the news. Infiltration teams have also been spotted around a few mobile air-defense batteries, but they managed to get away. Up here, we've got Soyuz and Tsyklon launches of tailing drones into HEO. Just a few, but if they're practicing for a match…"

"Sounds like a prelude to war. Wake up Sparky so he can de-spin the ship. Get Noah to put us on EMCON."

"One step ahead of you, chief. We're already on GOOSEBERRY. I need you to sign off on MELON."

Betty climbed through the heatshield hatch into the command pod, where Sparky (like Betty, still in his pajamas) was running through the pre-despin checklist. Paloma climbed in after her. After strapping herself in, Betty turned on the ship's point defense, and turned towards her pilot.

"You are go for de-spin, Sparky."

As weightlessness returned to the Tieshan Gongzhu, Betty began reading her new deployment orders.

"What'll it be, boss? Cargo escort? Platform defense? Commerce raiding? MIRV hunting?"

Sparky's voice grew thick with excitement at the last possibility. The (much cheaper and less capable) Soviet response to the Deep Space Deterrent Fleet, the Soviet Deep Orbit Deterrent Munitions were small, TKS-based satellites with 36 MIRVs - dunce cap-shaped nuclear bombs - each. Like the JOINTGOV Deep Space Deterrent Fleet, they relied on sheer distance (and the complete visibility of spacecraft in orbit) to keep them safe from destruction. In the event of a nuclear war, the satellites would drop their small, stealthy, cold MIRVs, which after a month or so would rain nuclear hellfire upon the Joint Government.

Hunting down and destroying the MIRVs, or the satellites housing them, would be a glamorous, exciting task. It would involve a mad dash to the very edge of Earth's gravity well, evasion of Soviet automated defenses, and lots of phased-array radar work.

Noah gasped, and Paloma, trying her best to look intimidating with her hair standing on end in weightlessness, glared at Sparky with slitted eyes.

"Sparky, if that went down, we would be waging global thermonuclear war with the Soviets. And I'm pretty sure that Oceanus Procellarum Lunar Colony is on the target list too."

Sparky shrugged. "Lava tubes are tough nuts to crack. Plus, it would be really, really cool…"

Betty put her fist down on the armrest (causing her to rise in her seat). "Cut it out, people. Our job is to continue shadowing the Valentina Tereshkova, and blow her to itty-bitty pieces if, and ONLY IF, she shoots at us first. We'll burn, and close to five thousand kilometers."

The confidence in Betty's assertion was not unwarranted. JOINTGOV frigates and destroyers were often a generation ahead of their Soviet counterparts, and far more livable to boot.

The Soviet Union could not hope to match JOINTGOV's scientific, engineering and technological prowess. The Soviet Union's population of ~300 million was less than one-tenth the population of the Joint Government. The Pacific's very good education system could churn out ten times more scientists and engineers than the Soviet Union. The wealthier Pacific's enormous economy could also afford to spend far more on R&D than the Soviet Union.

And that was before one considered the Joint Government's massive government expenditures on a bloated scientific-industrial complex, which far outstripped spending on its humongous military-industrial complex, and almost matched the expenditures of the gargantuan infrastructural-industrial complex. This scientific-industrial complex elevated the Pacific's per-capita research & development spending to the highest in the Solar System.

Conversely, the Soviet Union had to spend a very large proportion of its Gross National Product on its military, partially due to circumstances of its own making.

The Tieshan Gongzhu, like the Iron Fan Princess (from the old Chinese novel Journey to the West) for which she was named, packed a powerful punch. While incapable of extinguishing forest fires with a mystical hand fan, the ship's ultraviolet laser could certainly have started one – if Earth had no atmosphere, that is.

With an output power of three megawatts, the UV free-electron laser, which doubled as a tracking telescope, could kill ICBMs at five hundred kilometers, sweep enemy satellites from the sky, and read a newspaper headline from the edge of space (but not from a slightly saner low earth orbit).

The ship's complement of autonomous Brilliant Pebble antiship/antimissile mines could each deny a sphere of space to the enemy nearly a thousand kilometers in radius. While less deadly in high orbit (where orbital velocities are very low), they would still badly damage thin-skinned spacecraft.

For direct combat, the Tieshan Gongzhu carried a complement of nearly two hundred Gecko and eight Komodo antiship missiles. Basically Brilliant Pebbles strapped to advanced high-performance solid rocket motors, the Geckos would each close with their targets at 6-9 kilometers per second.

Neither the Brilliant Pebbles or Geckos needed warheads. An object impacting at 3 kilometers per second delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT, and kinetic energy increases quadratically with velocity. At six km/s, each kilogram of Gecko delivered four kilograms of TNT's worth of kinetic energy.

The Geckos weren't particularly heavy, and like all chemical rockets were mostly fuel. Minus their boost motors, drop tanks, and liquid maneuvering fuel, they massed less than five kilos each.

The Komodos, on the other hand, were monstrous missiles, capable of being fitted with a variety of warheads.

For conventional warfare, they could be tipped with large, hundred-kilogram fragmentation warheads, which would send hails of ball-bearings towards enemy ships.

For limited or unlimited thermonuclear war, 250-kiloton nuclear lances (casaba-howitzers) could be mounted. A modified shaped nuclear charge, nuclear lances could project a 50-kiloton spear of nuclear flame over several hundred kilometers, bypassing enemy point defenses and skewering enemy spacecraft.

For their obvious first-strike implications, their presence in low earth orbit had been banned under SALT I.

Rounding out the ship's armament was a 20mm caseless autocannon. With a very high rate of fire of 7200 rounds per minute, the autocannon could fire decoys, explosive shells, or mesh rounds. The latter were large, 4-meter-wide spinning nets that increased the likelihood that the rounds would hit inbound enemy munitions.

X-5 beeped, and Noah looked at his console. 'Artificial gamma-ray-burst series. Maneuvering friendly warship.', X-5 captioned. He grinned, punched the telescope controls, and projected his screen on the main cathode-ray-tube. "Guys, check this out."

Betty turned to see a flashing light against the black background of space. The light flashed outwards from a point, dissipated, and flashed again in a different place. The source of the light was on the move.

Noah pressed another button, and X-5 automatically zoomed in on the blurry, two-pixel image of one of SAC's nuclear pulse vehicles (NPVs). A battleship or a cruiser.

The tip of the Nuclear Tetrahedron (the other three vertices of which were bombers, land-based ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles), SAC's nuclear pulse battleships were the pride and joy of the SAC Space Operations Group. Each five-thousand-ton, thirty-meter-wide, hundred-meter-long cylindrical battleship carried enough MIRVs and megaton-range nuclear lances (bombs capable of projecting hundred-kiloton spears of nuclear fire over a thousand kilometers) to wipe the Communist Bloc from the face of the Earth.

Each of these mighty vessels was propelled efficiently through space by nuclear bombs. Every second, one kiloton-range shaped nuclear charge detonated behind a large shock absorber, a "pusher plate" shaped like a giant piston thirty meters across, propelling these enormous ships skywards at five gees of acceleration.

SAC had twelve of the mighty vessels, enough to keep 8-10 ships on continuous patrol, overwhelm Soviet defenses, cover for slip-ups, and destroy the third world too if they took the Soviet side in a thermonuclear war.

Now, with SAC being ordered to DEFCON 2, the ships were being put on maneuvers, which would place them (and their civilization-destroying arsenals) in more threatening orbits closer to Earth.

Also among the NPVs were the cruisers, battleships which had their vast nuclear arsenals removed. The resulting voids had been replaced with vast conventional arsenals, bigger lasers, and/or landing craft for a detachment of Joint Government Marines, turning them into general-purpose space warships.

This allowed SAC to meet arms limitation treaty requirements without scrapping any ships, keeping the generals happy, and allowed the bloated military-industrial complex to sell more ships, keeping the militaristic industrialists (whoever they were) happy. A win-win for all involved.

Whether or not the Joint Government actually needed a space fleet was of secondary concern.

Sparky whistled. "Is that the Juggernaut? I heard she was shipping out to the Powersat Platform, and that looks like the right place for a burn."

Noah, still glued to the screen in awe at the cascade of 10-kiloton propulsion bombs, shook his head. "Nah. It's not a cruiser. I checked the acceleration. It's just over five thousand tonnes. That's battleship mass. Probably the Erebus, since I heard they were staying close to the ecliptic for this run."

Paloma glowered at the duo. "Don't tell anyone you heard that – especially Ivan. And please, the next time someone tries to tell you something they're not supposed to, tell them to shut their pie holes."

Betty cleared her throat. "Train the telescope back on the Valentina and get back to work!"

* * *

 _Author's note: the short tirade on the huge scale and apparent political influence of the Joint Government's scientific-industrial complex pretty much explains the advanced technology of the world of The First Space War (which, depending on the sector, is 0-50 years ahead of the technology of real-world 1984). The lasers and fuel cells in particular are far beyond present (2017) technology._


	4. A Long and Boring Trip

4: A long, boring trip

11th October 1984

Space Ferry IPV _Fiddlers Three_

En route to Lagrange 5 Industrial Complex

The Asteroid Recovery Consortium (ARC) (小行星採擇集團) was a government-sponsored boondoggle. Posterity would remember it as a great and profitable corporation that ended man's reliance on precious and scarce lunar ice, but as of 1984, it was a sloppily managed public-private partnership.

Since the first successful whole-asteroid capture in '78, ARC had borrowed and invested massive sums into redirecting a parade of million-tonne carbonaceous chondrites, silicaceous asteroids, and metallic asteroids into L5 and the 2:1 Powersat construction complex.

When the first asteroid of this second crop of rocks began barreling through HEO in 1980, ARC realized that there was insufficient refining capability in high earth orbit – all of the big refineries were either on Luna or on the near-earth asteroid mines, which shipped only refined metals for export.

It had hastily begun work on refining facilities, one at the Powersat Complex in 2:1 lunar resonance orbit, and the other at L5.

L5 had been a political decision. The Joint Government wanted an expanded presence in the leading and trailing Lagrange points, and the lobbyists of the L5 Society (and the infrastructural-industrial complex) wanted giant O'Neil-style space colonies (of dubious value) in those same locations. The actual market for refined materials in L5 was non-existent.

Unlike the 2:1 facility, which was now chugging along nicely, the L5 facility had suffered from delay after delay, and multiple design changes had increased costs significantly.

Worse for ARC, the tens of millions of tons of unprocessed rock in HEO had led to a drop in raw materials prices. ARC was now overbuilt, overborrowed, and overvalued. Pension funds and insurance companies bayed for blood.

ARC's new management had responded with asset sales, pay cuts, and layoffs.

The local labor union, already discontent with management, had responded with a strike that had lasted a month.

The strike had dragged on long enough that the Labor Department had decided to send a delegation to lubricate the process.

It had also seen enough violence that the Unified Security Service had seen fit to deploy a squad of Joint Government Marines to provide the delegation with close protection.

The two operatives they had initially planned for were excellent agents, but it was eventually decided that more muscle would be necessary to defend against a union of three hundred.

Stacked in the crash couches of the ferry _Fiddlers Three_ , surrounded by trained infantrymen, Ron felt that he and his best friend (currently snoring away in the couch next to his) were somewhat out of place.

The khaki service uniforms worn by the fifteen Marines sitting across from him did little to dispel that feeling.

The passengers of the _Fiddlers Three_ had spent much of the 36-hour trip to L-5 staring at each other, sleeping, and watching movies on their CRTs. The haste with which the task force had been assembled had resulted in unclear directives as to who was in charge of what, and Kim, exhausted, had little energy to discuss the matter with the Lieutenant.

Ron, bored out of his wits, decided to make conversation. He turned to the bored-looking Lieutenant flipping through pages of a fashion magazine.

"So… Lieutenant…" Ron squinted "…Garcia-Shapiro."

The dark-haired woman looked up quizzically. "Call me Isabella, Agent Stoppable."

Ron nearly laughed at the Lieutenant's high-pitched voice, before eyeing her sidearm and uniform. He tried to think of something to say. Her Jewish surname gave him an opening. "Call me Ron. Do you still celebrate Hanukah?"

Isabella nodded. "We celebrate with Dad's side of the family. I'm not a practicing Jew, though."

Ron shrugged. "How many people are these days?"

Isabella shrugged. Ron decided on another line of inquiry. "So… nice weather we're having, eh?"

The Lieutenant chuckled. "Yes, the solar cycle is winding down. Fewer solar flares, lower radiation doses during EVAs. I've even seen dockworkers wearing skin-suits instead of full gear. Where are you stationed, Agent Stoppable?"

"We have an apartment in New Singapore. It's a rental – I don't plan on settling the Moon. Food's terrible. We report in to the local USS base in Section Sixteen."

Isabella raised an eyebrow. "We?"

"The rent was a little on the high side, so I invited Kim to move in too."

Isabella nodded. "I'm based out of Camp Mercado, also Section Sixteen. They should really give the tube section a name. A number is really bad for property values."

Ron chuckled. "So is having a firing range next to your apartment. A Marine, eh? You get to go anywhere interesting besides the Moon?"

Isabella pointed at the ribbons on her shoulder. "Egypt, Izmir, Lebanon, and the Powersat Platform."

Ron winced. "Were you in Beirut last year?"

The images of scores of Marines (all women) being pulled from the rubble of the Beirut barracks had been quite a shock to the population, and in certain North American provinces had reignited debate about women in combat positions. Given that women had been conscripted for military service since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Rebellion in the 1850s, the debate was unlikely to amount to much.

Isabella shook her head. "My battalion rotated out before things got hairy. The battalion next door got mangled, though." The Lieutenant's satphone – a bulky plastic box with twelve keys and an antenna – rang, and she got up to answer. Ron looked intently as the Lieutenant frowned at whatever was being discussed.

Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro turned to her troops, and began giving orders. "Okay, ladies, listen up! As of now, we are on DEFCON 3. We're a long way from the Czech Republic, but the reach of the Bear is long. They may decide to start a war with sabotage; they may decide to start a war with nukes. Either way, we need to be on our toes. Captain Marcos has ordered us to cut our training and recreation shifts."

Groans came from the Marines, some still rubbing their eyes from being woken early.

"Grow a spine and cut the whining, ladies!"

Kim woke up, startled by the commotion. "Ron?" She yawned. "What's with the yelling?"

"Looks like the Executive's decided things are heating up with the Soviets. Uhh… Kim? Do we need to do anything?"

Kim shook her head. "Nah. DEFCON's for the military. It's probably just posturing. Concoct a big scary crisis and get the Ruskies to back off. We did it with Cuba, and we'll do it again."


	5. Imagery Intelligence

12th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

Paloma, off-duty and headphones on, whooped and cheered as the red-shirted members of the Nicaraguan Provincial Football Team scored another goal against their blue-shirted counterparts from Qinghai.

On-duty but with nothing to do, Sparky alternated between trying to follow the game and reading a dated issue of the _Weekly Wonder_ , which had an interesting article on the lives of the members of ABBA after their breakup.

Noah sighed as he stared as the emissions profile of the Valentina Tereshkova. With the telescope (and the entire sensor suite) trained 24/7 on the Valentina Tereshkova, he would be unable to use it for his next planned paper – the multispectral characterization of the Triangulum Galaxy.

It was no secret that many astronomers joined the Air Force for telescope time (after getting university scholarships out of it, of course). The pioneers of the Space Operations Group had been scientist-soldiers, and they had encouraged an extremely science-friendly culture within the SOG, going so far as to reserve several tonnes of payload mass for scientific experiments on the thousand-tonne battleships of the DSDF.

Performance wise, the Tieshan Gongzhu's 5-m telescope/laser was no match for the new 100-m-diameter (segmented mirror) Ridiculously Large Telescope(s) parked at EML2, or the EML2 Huge Optical Interferometer (a constellation of 60 or so 10-m telescopes with a baseline of many kilometers). It could not resolve exoplanets or image sunspots on Proxima. Ruggedized and designed for military operations, it was suboptimal for astronomy.

It was still larger than the first optical space telescopes, and Noah (who could never hope of getting telescope time on the RLTs or HOI) had more-or-less free reign over the telescope schedule.

Noah daydreamed of studying Triangulum. He would first use the telescope to image the nearby Galaxy in IR, visible light, and UV. The phased-array radar receiver would do for radio and microwave observations, although he would have to omit the classified specifications from the appendix. The x-ray spectrometer and gamma ray telescope (designed to characterize nuclear explosions and reactors) would be next…

X-5 beeped. 'Operator inattention.' read the caption.

Noah shook his head. What would Betty think?

He really didn't want to disappoint his demanding, determined, friendly, pretty commanding officer…

X-5 beeped his headset again. 'Operator inattention'.

Noah glowered at the screen, wondering how the computer had deduced that he was not paying attention. Paloma placed her hand on Noah's shoulder.

"Quit daydreaming, Lieutenant. We're almost at our holding point."

Noah inhaled, popped a caffeine pill, and began re-analyzing the data from the ship's sensors.

The millimeter-wave radar return from the Valentina was substantially different from prior readings, which was normal. Modular spacecraft gained or lost modules all the time, and each change radically altered the radar signature.

The image of the Valentina Tereshkova, two thousand kilometers or so away, filled his screen. Classified as an SV-9b class destroyer by the Air Force, the Valentina Tereshkova, like the Tieshan, was a nuclear thermal rocket. However, unlike the Tieshan Gongzhu, which was built around a truss, the Valentina was built around a large cylindrical liquid hydrogen tank, eight meters in diameter. Its solid-core nuclear thermal rocket was also less efficient and less powerful than the Tieshan Gongzhu's liquid-core rocket – two generations behind on every metric.

Noah had seen SV-9bs before, and they usually had the appearance of a big, thick crayon, with the rocket motor at the pointy end and some fiddly bits on the flat end. In her current configuration, visible with a resolution of less than half a meter, Noah felt that he was looking at some odd species of squid.

Instead of the flush crew cabin and truss (bristling with weapons) which usually topped off the stack, the Valentina instead sported a cluster of cylindrical fuel tanks. Two of those – larger than the others - were obviously full of chemical laser reactants, judging by the single oversized 8-m IR laser that hung on the side of the ship.

The other tanks were a mystery. Too small to be economical drop tanks, and too large to be missiles…

Noah pulled up a registry of Soviet spacecraft and munitions. The diameter was about right for a Soviet intercept bus, but it made no sense to deploy those with a nuclear thermal rocket, let alone a destroyer. An ion tug would suffice, and the Soviets had plenty of those. It was also about the same diameter as a Soyuz – but the tail was hemispherical, indicating a mono-tank design.

Noah looked closely at the hydrogen tank. Additional bracing and a whole new outer shell had been added to it. Up-armored? What for?

He checked the surveillance report again. As they did occasionally (to reduce wear on their solid core reactors), the Soviets had pushed the Valentina into her high earth orbit with a pair of ALOX chemical tugs.

Noah had a brainwave, and ran through his spectrometry data and x-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.

The composition of the reactor casing did not match the typical superalloy used in SV-4bs. Nor did the ionizing radiation from the "cold" reactor (which would still contain many of the radioactive fission fragments and neutron activation products from previous burns) match previous observations.

He commanded X-5 to run a database search for both.

Ten seconds later, X-5 responded with a list of probable matches. 'High-neutron-flux Metal Matrix Composite', 'liquid-core nuclear thermal rocket'.

Noah's eyes went wide. The presence of a powerful liquid-core rocket motor on the Valentina evened the odds between the two ships in favor of the Soviets. In fact, Noah calculated that the delta-vee of the Valentina – its ability to maneuver and change trajectory – might significantly exceed that of the Tieshan, regardless of whether the giant propellant tank was full of water or hydrogen.

Noah quickly typed up a report and sent it to Chongqing via tightbeam (laser). He then left his chair, floated through the heat-shield hatch, and ascended two decks to the galley/rec room.

"Major? The Soviets have a new ship."

* * *

 _Real World: The Hubble Space Telescope's mirror is 2.4m across – a size chosen for its commonality with US NRO spy satellite mirrors. The Tieshan Gongzhu's mirror is twice the diameter, and its main telescope has twice the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope._


	6. Labor Relations

12th October 1984

Asteroid Recovery Consortium Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

The support structure of the ARC complex was a 4-hectare-pizza box of girdles and support beams. Dozens of interlinked industrial modules of all shapes and sizes had been attached to both sides of this framework like needles in a pincushion. The largest modules among them measured thirty meters across and ten stories tall, dominating the complex.

On the sunward face of the complex, a 4-hectare solar panel canopy converted sunlight into electricity.

A pair of counter-rotating crosses affixed to a common axis protruded from one edge of the station. At the ends of their wiry, fifty-meter-long arms were apartment-block sized habitat modules, which provided their inhabitants with between 0.2 and 0.4 gravities of centripetal acceleration depending on how high up they were.

All of these were dwarfed by the eight giant bowl-shaped mirrors – each easily two hundred meters across – that protruded from the central pizza box. The solar furnaces these mirrors fed could heat asteroidal ores to thousands of degrees – more than adequate for the extraction of metals or ices.

On the shadowed side of the station, protected from the sun's glare by solar panels and the bowl-shaped mirrors, liquid droplet radiators released waste heat into space. Alongside them, special nets and arms held down three small asteroids – meatball-shaped affairs 100-200m in diameter – as they were processed for raw materials.

Three other asteroids were parked between three and four hundred meters from the installation, protected from the sun's glare by large, spin-stabilized, circular flat mirrors and kept in place by long booms, which sufficed to prevent the rocks from clumping together in accordance with the law of universal gravitation.

"It looks like the world's biggest game of tic tac toe. Oh, look! The guy with the Os hasn't used all his pieces!"

"Ron, don't belittle the installation."

* * *

12th October 1984

Temporary Conference Room 1

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

The tour of the installation had been uneventful, and the introductory speeches – made by members of the delegation to the assembled workers – had gone well.

Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro's speech had been particularly memorable.

"We are not here as company goons. We are not here to force you back to work. We _are_ here, however, to make sure nobody – union or management - gets thrown out of an airlock."

"We're also here because this station has a stockpile of nuclear mining explosives, and because any one of the six rocks parked outside can blow up Belgium. No matter how high passions run, rocks and nukes are off-limits. Or else. Capisce?"

The negotiations themselves were not going as smoothly.

The Labor Department representative had guaranteed once more the availability of a government compensation fund in the event that ARC declared bankruptcy. ARC had in turn backed away from their proposed 8% pay cut.

The workers had backed away from their initial demand of a major pay raise, but continued to demand the return of more advanced, safer, and more comfortable EVA equipment, which management had transported to another, more profitable site. They also demanded the improved food, housing, and recreational facilities which management had previously promised would be online by 1982. The ARC negotiator's counteroffer – a 4% pay cut in exchange for such facilities – had just been rejected.

Kim watched with disinterest from her couch, located at the far end of the long table, placed near the center of the square conference room. In a quaint nod to terrestrial formalities, all the participants were seated (i.e. strapped into couches with harnesses) despite the lack of gravity.

It's also a lot easier to write in zero-gee when you're strapped into a couch.

The ARC negotiator, a lanky Anglo-Pacifican named Jeremy Johnson, was a reasonable negotiator. With his disarming, laid-back tone, he exuded honesty and an earnest desire for a fair settlement which might sway moderate strikers – generally the bulk of any strike.

Mr. Johnson, a company lawyer, and the local manager sat opposite to three representatives of the striking workers. Felix Renton, a robotics engineer, Adrena Lynn, an EVA repairwoman, and Ed Lipsky, an engineer for the station's large mining machines and mechs.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Renton, but we cannot make improvements to this facility without the necessary demand to support them. No company is willing to set up a gym or a food court out here for a workforce of barely three hundred. The union will have to subsidize these facilities."

"Mr. Johnson, management promised these things when we came out here to work. We spend a whole year out here at a stretch. We were willing to put up with the barebones facilities for the first rotation because we thought this place would eventually get off the ground.."

"So did we, Mr. Renton."

A man wearing a sleeveless blue shirt and sporting a mullet of blond hair yelled out.

"That's not our problem!"

"Mr. Lipsky, please calm down. We don't want this facility to be shut down, but if we don't pare down the costs, this facility isn't going to survive until business around L-5 picks up in a few years."

"Is that a threat, suit-man?!"

The door suddenly flew open, and five workers, holding long alloy poles, floated into the room with practiced ease.

Kim unbuckled her harness and was airborne before Renton could finish his appeal for calm.

Fighting in freefall is much different from fighting in gravity. In gravity, one's weight and shoes automatically anchor one to the ground, allowing one to punch and kick without flying away from your enemy, which wastes the energy of the punch or kick. In freefall, bracing is essential. Maneuvering in mid-air is also tricky.

Kim slammed into one striker feet first, grabbed his stick, bopped him in the head while they grappled, and kicked him ineffectually into his comrades. This was intentional. Being much lighter than the striker, Kim gained most of the kinetic energy from the pushoff, and zoomed across the room. She flipped the stick to rotate her body, and slammed into striker number two.

Pinning striker number two against the wall, and, setting aside her stick for the moment, Kim grabbed both his arms and kicked him hard in the chest. This proved sufficient to break his ribs. The man screamed in pain as Kim pushed off him (and the wall) to re-engage his comrades, who were trying to go around the other end of the table.

Using the back of Renton's couch as support, Kim kicked another striker – a woman – into the opposite wall.

A pair of strikers crossed the table. One braced his legs against the table and swung his pole in a vertical arc down at Kim. Kim dodged, and, braced against the back of a chair, swung her own pole in a horizontal arc, sweeping away the man's support and sending him spinning. The striker recovered, and tried thrusting his stick at Kim while braced against the ceiling (upside down from Kim's perspective).

Kim dodged, and, wedging her legs between the table and couch – an unassailable tactical position - whacked the stick from the striker's arm and swung the rod at the man's head. The man screamed.

Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro floated into the room, pistol drawn. The lone striker who had escaped Kim's wrath, her hands on the collar of the ARC negotiator, backed away, hands in the air.

Adrena Lynn unbuckled her harness and floated up. Like many women working in weightlessness, she kept her blond hair short and well-gelled to prevent it from floating around like a giant bush.

"Lipsky! Are these your goons? Did you bug the conference room?"

"Information wants to be FREE! AHHHH-YEAH!" Ed Lipsky did his best impression of an air guitar in freefall.

Mr. Renton placed his hands to his face. "Guys, it wasn't a threat. Well, maybe a little. Get back outside. Someone find that bug! And Miss Possible! Was it really necessary to start bashing heads in before we talked this out?"

Kim frowned, and pointed to the ARC negotiator. "Those goons were out to kill Mr. Johnson!"

Lynn put her hands on his hips. "Did you even consider the possibility that they were just posturing, hot-head?"

Johnson sighed, a look of disappointment – not anger – on his face. "Agent Possible, I understand that you have been trained for situations where a moment's hesitation may mean the difference between life and death. However, the delicate situation at hand requires contemplation and restraint. We're here to cooperate with the strikers, not fight them. Violence only begets more violence."

Lynn snickered. "Or at least that's the line management guys like you feed us."

Kim was about to retort that a demonstration of superior force was also effective at deterring violence, but a subtle shake of the head from Ron made her bite her tongue.

"Okay. I'll visit the injured strikers and try to play nice."

Renton smiled. "I'll come with you."

The meeting adjourned there.

Kim turned a corner, dialed a number, and placed her satphone to her ear. Ed Lipsky's voice came in over the phone. "That USS lady is crazy. Seriously, dudes. We don't want to mess with Red."

The coin-shaped bugs, discreetly slipped into the strikers' clothing during the scuffle, were working perfectly.

* * *

12th October 1984

Cafeteria, Tower 1, Spin Habitat Complex

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility.

Much to Kim's surprise, Renton had accepted Ron's request to have lunch with him. Even more to her surprise, Felix had allowed Ron to drag Kim along.

"So, Mr. Renton, what exactly do we have on this famously horrible menu of yours?"

"Please, call me Felix, Agent Possible." Felix extended his hand.

"Kim." Kim shook it.

They floated into a rotating chamber marked SPIN HUB A, from which four tubes extended. The rotary seals that made SPIN HUB A possible had been triumphs of engineering, taking years of effort and billions of taxpayer dollars to design and perfect. Dedicated space stations had been built to test, evaluate, and improve them. Now, individual spin hubs – used on stations, ships, and other installations across the system – were so common as to be beneath notice.

Felix retrieved a small, parked wheelchair, and joined Kim and Ron on a semicircular lift. Kim closed her eyes and tried not to be sick as the world spun around her.

The descended a fabric tube into Tower 1, and Kim felt weight return to her body. Her eyes opened wide. Felix, who had seemed perfectly fine in zero-gee, was in a wheelchair.

"For carbs, we've got real rice or substitute pasta, with the condiment of your choice. For protein, we've got single-cell substitute tofu…"

"Don't you mean substitute meat?"

Substitute meats (ersatz chicken, ersatz duck, etc.) made from tofu were reasonably popular among vegetarians in China.

"Nah. Substitute tofu made from methanogenic bacteria. They're part of the closed life-support system. We've got bacterial egg, tofu, pate, meat paste… It's pretty similar to the real thing, and the stuff is very good with soy sauce and rice, but it gets bland after the first three months. The Chinese-Pacificans and Indian-Pacificans up here take it better than us Anglo-Pacificans, but they're fed up with it too."

"Anything else?"

"Well, everyone gets their ration of airline meals. We have turkey, lasagna, fried rice, pho tai, and twenty other things. We get one tennis-ball-sized packet every meal. Stuff's not bad either, but you try everything within a week, and you still get most of your calories from the bland stuff."

"Fiber?"

"Ohhhh, boy. Half pressed algal seaweed substitute, half frozen lunar vegetables."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like typical space worker fare. The Marines eat the same stuff. It's been standard since lunar colonization days, hasn't it?"

Renton grimaced.

"Times have changed. This setup would have made people jump for joy a decade ago. Before I came out here, I worked at the Powersat Platform. From '73 to '75, it was just like this. Barebones accommodations, bland, cheap food produced from life support with minimal processing – except the lunar rice, because wet rice agriculture is super-efficient, and because Chi-Pacs without rice riot."

They stepped off the lift into the busy cafeteria.

"But by the time the platform began producing Powersats, the hab cluster had a Shanghai Grandma, Tsui Wah, Bueno Nacho, Cow & Chow, J.P Bearymore's Lite. Fake crust, fake cheese, real pizza, real meat. The corporations had finally taken notice of the demand, and began supplying. They shipped up machines and staff to make tastier stuff from available stock. Capitalism at work. We needed to pay out-of-pocket or use company coupons, but man it was good to have things to buy. The Powersat Platform has a shopping mall these days."

They arrived at the front of the line, and Kim scooped a helping of rice from a big rice cooker. A tofu machine spat a cuboid of tofu decorated with green algae bits onto her plate, and she added soy sauce and cooked oil.

"Sounds like the same problem with Soviet Communism. You get paid, but there's nothing good to buy."

Renton chuckled at Kim's remark. "This station's location was dictated by state-led development planning. The technocrats were hoping to develop L-5, and so they parked it here. If you build it, they will come, they said. Can't blame them either – they spent nearly a trillion on the Moon colony for similar reasons and it turned out pretty well eventually."

" _Eventually_ being the operative word."

They sat down to eat.

"So, Felix?" Ron was speaking between mouthfuls of food, and some of it fell out. "What's the deal with Lipsky and his goons?"

"Falling back into agent mode, eh, Stoppable? Okay. Ed Lipsky's the head of the heavy machinery engineering team here. He works on the big mobile scrapers, the grinder-baggers, and the zero-gee conveyors. He also maintains the space pods – the big cylinders with the giant mechanical arms we use to replace large parts. This gives him a lot of stock with the pod workers and surface mining team – his equipment keeps them alive. Ed used to work at Great Wall Conglomerate R&D designing big mining rigs or tanks or something, but he got fired and became an anarchist. It might have been the other way round."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "What the heck is he doing out here?"

Felix smiled. "The guy's convinced that the Final Frontier is where Man will find ultimate freedom. He says he's going to start an asteroid mine once he gets the capital, and live off the land."

Kim laughed so hard a piece of rice went up her nose. "Seriously? He does realize that he'll be eating nothing but tofu and substitute pasta in his one-man shack, right? Or does he have a community planned?"

"The latter."

Ron continued the de facto interview as Kim blew the debris from her nostrils and chugged a glass of water. "So what's he got to do with this strike?"

"Ed's mostly ticked off about his shiny, efficient, easy-to-maintain equipment being taken away from him when management decided to put this place into hibernation. When we pushed back, some Company Security guys used excessive force. Ed and his boys paid that back threefold. I don't like the guy, but a lot of people here think his methods are justified."

"And Lynn?"

"Adrena's not so bad. A little snarky, but she's got the right stuff, if you know what I mean. Fearless. You'd have to be to work on the EVA repair team."

"What about you, Felix?" Kim took a sip of her orange juice. It didn't taste at all like real orange juice.

"I got sick of university robotics research after three years, so I came out here. My specialty is the remotes – the small teleoperated and semi-autonomous robots we use to keep the place running with minimal EVAs. Day to day work's basically inspecting everything, directing maintenance schedules, and evaluating performance. Before all this went down, I was hoping I would get promoted when this place expanded. Now, I'm thinking of going back to a more well-established installation. Not back to Earth, though."

Ron pointed to Felix's wheelchair. "Staying upwell has perks for a guy who can't walk, huh?"

Kim choked on her orange juice. "Ron!"

Felix laughed. "Yeah. I can actually get around as well as everybody else up here. I'm pretty good at basketball in full gee, but up here, I'm unbeatable!"

* * *

13th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

The day had gone well. Most of the workers Kim had the opportunity to talk to were reasonably sane, and nobody appeared to pose an actionable threat to state security. Many voiced their distrust of ARC, some voiced their distrust in the government's handling of the situation, and some were openly hostile towards her for beating up their coworkers.

Kim had passed her condolences to the injured strikers, but had pointedly not accepted responsibility for the scuffle.

Ron lost a basketball game to Felix, and earned some goodwill by making sweet tofu dessert with the ingredients on hand.

Kim, reasonably relaxed, was sound asleep when her satphone beeped insistently.

She picked up the black, boxy device. The pager function had notified her.

'Contact lost with device #3.' That was the bug Kim had placed on Ed Lipsky.

Kim groaned. In a metal mazework like this, loss of signal would always be a problem. She turned on her tracking kit – a tiny cathode-ray-tube TV in the corner of a thick briefcase, and her eyes opened wide.

According to the orbital positioning system (a constellation of trans-lunar positioning satellites), the last place the tracking device had been before loss of signal was airlock 6B. Spacesuits were reasonable signal blockers.

Why was Ed doing an EVA while on strike?

* * *

Clad in their pajamas, access keys in hand, Kim and Ron raced down the hallway (floating, of course) to airlock 6B. Two suitports – spacesuits attached directly to, and entered from, hatches in the inner airlock face – were missing. Placing her pistol in a tool-lock, Kim leapt feet-first into a suitport, sealed it, and took her first steps in the bulky semi-rigid suit. Ron followed, and handed Kim her pistol as the airlock depressurized. The outer doors opened, and Kim and Ron were momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun.

The view took Ron's breath away. Above them, a gigantic wall of deep blue, the facility's main solar panel, stretched into the distance. Below them were a few girders, miscellaneous bits and bobs, and the huge, gleaming bowl of main solar furnace #4. And before them was a blindingly white disk, unnaturally low in the boundless black sky.

* * *

Beyond the light-absorbing, light-refracting gases of Earth's atmosphere, the sun shines brighter than above any desert on Earth. Most spacecraft surfaces are thus colored white or reflective silver for thermal control purposes.

As such, Ron readily spotted the two figures clad in bright orange, high-visibility spacesuits as he clambered over the beams of the ARC facility. Kim was on the move before he had a chance to speak.

Kim, disregarding safety protocols, leapt from beam to beam, counting on her agility, dexterity, and emergency thruster pack to prevent her from drifting off into space. If they spotted her (and her orange spacesuit) now, they might destroy the evidence of whatever they were doing, perhaps by chucking it off into space.

Ron hesitantly followed, carefully attaching his tether line to the regularly spaced attachment points. He was determined not to jeopardize the mission by needing rescue.

While trained for extra-vehicular activity, intelligence gathering, and special warfare work, Ron had very little talent in (or stomach for) any of these activities, and was just barely competent enough to pass the required exams and assessments. Kim, on the other hand…

Kim braced herself against a beam, drew her pistol, and kicked one space-suited figure hard. The two figures turned around, and put their hands in the air. From his vantage point above and behind Kim, Ron could just make a complicated-looking setup of tubes and containers.

* * *

"Ed? Why were you on an unauthorized EVA?"

"I told you, Red, the beer wasn't cuttin' it! And there's no booze to buy up here!"

Ron nodded. "I know, right? It's ridiculous! But wouldn't it have been easier to have booze delivered to you in the mail?"

"Management has strict restrictions on spirits! Plus, it would've been too expensive to…"

Kim stood, and bent over the table. "Sell? Were you selling illegally distilled spirits?"

Ron put his hand on Kim's shoulder, and tried to convince her to sit down.

"Look, Ed. We're not with Customs and Excise. We're Unified Security Service. We don't care about your booze, or your vacuum still. We're just worried about the security of this installation."

Kim looked scandalized. "Ron! His moonshine could have killed someone! His vacuum still could have blown up someone on an EVA!"

Ron motioned Kim to sit back down, and turned back to Ed, an apologetic look on his face.

"Like the Marine said, this place is sitting on megatons of nuclear explosives and Belgium-destroying rocks o'doom. Just tell us how you got the suitport access keys, and we'll be on our merry way. We might even decide not to tell management."

Ed looked around the room.

"The keys have been circulating among us for months. I dunno who snuck 'em out, I just borrowed 'em from the pool-"

Ed stopped mid-sentence.

Kim leaned in closer. "What pool, Ed? Who was in on it?"

* * *

"Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro, we have a security problem. A large proportion of the station's personnel have uncontrolled access to EVA suits."

Lieutenant Isabella Garcia-Shapiro rubbed her eyelids as she considered the agent's statement. Uncontrolled access to EVA suits meant unsupervised EVAs, and unsupervised EVAs meant…

The external structure of the facility might have been compromised.

With the armed forces on DEFCON 3, with the designation of this facility as an Industrial Installation of Strategic Importance, and with the Soviet Union on a warpath… this could not be ignored.

That meant external sweeps. She groaned as she imagined the detailed planning such an operation, taking place over the four-hectare factory would entail.

"You got it, Agent Possible. I'll organize the sweeps and draft the workers."

"Thank you, Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro."

"They're not going to like this."


	7. Ignition

14th October 1984

Inclined High Earth Orbit

Noah, roused from his sleep, descended one deck from the bedroom, did a somersault in mid-air, and entered the command deck. Betty, Paloma, and Sparky were clustered around the bridge's biggest CRT. His skintight spacesuit chafed his neck. Noah hated DEFCON 2 procedures. No hot food, no spin gravity, low air pressure with increased risk of fire (necessary for compatibility with low-pressure skintight suits), living in the darned spacesuits…

"Okay, run the simulation again."

The cathode ray tube screen showed a pair of intersecting trumpet-bell-shaped cones, each representing the presumed maneuvering envelopes of the Tieshan Gongzhu and the Valentina Tereshkova. A pair of circles representing presumed effective weapons ranges appeared around the edges of each cone.

Again, the line representing the Tieshan Gongzhu quickly found itself inside the Valentina's weapons circle.

Sparky shook his head. "We can't outrun the Val. A liquid-core reactor that size, with that much water to burn, can always outrun and outmaneuver us. We shipped out with barely 12,000 m/s of delta-vee, and we have 11,000 left. The Val has 16-20,000 m/s of the stuff."

Noah, still not fully awake, looked puzzled. Sparky reiterated his last point.

"Delta-vee? The amount in meters per second by which we can change velocity, meaning our ability to run, throw missiles, and turn? The stuff they talked about in OCS?"

Noah looked at Sparky, an irritated look on his face.

"I know that." He furrowed his brow. "How did we find out what they were using for propellant?"

Paloma was the first to speak. "We dropped a drone for a closer look. They burned away with maneuvering thrusters. We back-calculated spacecraft mass: It's huge. They kept a big tank meant for liquid hydrogen and filled it with water – which is fourteen times denser than LH2."

Noah raised an eyebrow. "Why on earth are they doing a regular HEO patrol with 20,000 m/s of delta-vee? It's like driving a tanker truck from Calgary to Winnipeg because you're worried you'll run out of gas. You end up spending a lot more on gas!"

Betty looked sheepish. "That's actually why we woke you. We just went on a war alert. The Joint Chiefs don't think the Soviets are posturing anymore. Things are going to heat up, and probably within the next 48 hours."

Betty put her arm on Noah's shoulder. "You might want to send a message home before things start exploding down there."

Sparky crossed his arms. "And we're stuck out here with just two tanks of propellant. If I had four I could run circles around the Val."

Betty watched worriedly as Noah floated over to his station, tired and angry. She needed her crew at 110%, now more than ever, but if Noah was mentally unprepared to shoot at the enemy…

She stopped herself. Heck, nobody was prepared for this. The Joint Government is too powerful; Our military is too advanced; The Soviets have too much to lose; All the wargames say that starting a big war is hard. Or so went the mantras of the advocates of reduced defense budgets.

Even she had believed it. Heck, when she was assigned to deep-space operations, she thought that she would never see combat. Even the most ridiculously up-scaled proxy war would at most involve shoot-downs of the Rods from God platforms and laser-stars in Low Orbit.

A global conventional war, on the other hand, would almost certainly involve the industrial facilities of High Earth Orbit. And the unthinkable scenario of a global thermonuclear war would see SAC's space battleships scream down on Earth to release thousands of thermonuclear warheads.

She had full authorization to use her ship's four nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles (a regulatory hangover from SAC's nuclear-missile-armed interceptor force). If their use proved necessary, was she prepared to fire them, and unleash more destruction than all the bombs dropped during World War II? If ordered (which would indicate that JOINTGOV was running mind-numbingly low on nuclear deterrent), was she prepared to launch them at Moscow? Warsaw?

Was she prepared, as the saying went, to cross the nuclear threshold?

Paloma tapped her CO's shoulder. "Ma'am? Should we close to engagement range? We probably outgun the Val, and it'll probably help to minimize the amount we need to maneuver."

Sparky shook his head. "If we do that, they might start shooting at us. If the Soviets invade Europe, we'll fight 'em in Europe. We do not want to start the first space war!"

Betty furrowed her brow. She was privy to the results from the most recent war games. The Joint Government's scattered territories (especially the Chinese Administrative Area) had the most to lose if a European war went global. On the other hand, the Joint Government was also much better-equipped to fight a global conventional war than the Soviets, and would probably win a quick global conventional war in other theaters.

The war games had concluded that public opinion – especially from a billion Chinese voters - would probably dictate that the war be confined to Europe if possible. More importantly for Betty, CINCSAC had concurred with that conclusion, and given orders to that effect.

Betty shook her head. "We stay here, and keep the reactor warm."

Noah suddenly jumped up, and the blue globe of Earth appeared on-screen.

"Guys, we've got a launch."

Noah magnified the image, and overlaid tracking data. A thousand dots, each representing a hot tactical ballistic missile rocket motor, appeared on a tracking grid over Eastern Europe. Seconds later, hundreds of dots winked off the screen, destroyed by Brilliant Pebbles and Hellbeamers (High Energy Lasers). Other dots (with friendly IFF tags helpfully tacked on by X-5) began winking in and out as Soviet antisatellite weapons (ASATs) took their toll on defense platforms. Tens of thousands of dots – rocket artillery weapons and divisional ASATs – came next.

Nobody spoke as Noah, Paloma, Sparky, and Betty scrambled to their stations and donned helmets. Similar scenes played out across cis-lunar space as thousands of men and women rushed to prepare for an enemy attack that might or might not come.

An encrypted radio message came in from Chongqing.

"Attention all spacecraft, this is Chongqing. The Soviets have begun conventional combat operations against our forces in Western Europe, and have begun shooting down space weapons platforms in LEO. This is not a drill. As per previous orders, you are not to engage the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces unless fired upon. We're at war now, people. Stay sharp."

Betty, alongside half her crew and hundreds of better-informed military personnel, counted the minutes until impact of the first salvo of IRBMs and SRBMs, even as she frantically double-checked her firing solutions.

Five minutes later, the first Scud warhead burst into a thousand small bomblets over an airfield in West Germany, showering the parked JGAF F/A-22s and Luftwaffe F-15F/Gs with steel-coated carnage.

Similar scenes repeated themselves across the length and breadth of Western Europe as aerospace defense batteries, command centers, bridges, airfields, and other strategic installations were hit by missiles.

No mushroom clouds rose from the wreckage, no lethal chemicals choked or persisted, and no flashes (IR, visible, x-ray, or gamma) were visible from High Orbit.

Betty and Paloma sighed with relief. X-5 chirped, and Noah spoke. "Return salvo outbound."

The radio cracked to life again. "Attention all spacecraft, this is Chongqing. The situation has not changed. Previous directives remain."

As AFCENT got its act together, hundreds of conventionalized Redstone IRBMs and Atlatl hypersonic cruise missiles raced skywards from surviving launch sites in Western Europe, striking targets in Eastern Europe in a similar fashion.

Hundreds more cruise and ballistic missiles surged skywards from surviving Navy ships in the Mediterranean and Baltic, and a fierce missile battle erupted between a Soviet cruiser group and a carrier battle group in the Aegean. Orbital kinetic weapons soon joined in, hurling guided tungsten rods and multi-megawatt laser beams at the combatants and receiving missile fire and sprays of seawater in return. Submarines dueled beneath the seas around Europe, and a total of six submarines – each built at the cost of tens to hundreds of millions of rubles or dollars – would be sunk by the end of the hour.

In the skies over Europe, thousands of aircraft unleashed salvos of missiles upon each other as both sides vied for air superiority. A hundred fell from the sky. It was expected that total aircraft losses over the first four days would amount to a thousand aircraft.

The artillery barrage had yet to lift, but when it did, half a million WARPAC troops would march across the borders of the Czech Republic, and advance a hundred kilometers by the end of the day. A division of JOINTGOV "military advisors" entered Yugoslavia.

Across Europe, firefights were already ongoing around a few airfields, ports, bridges, and strategic installations, as JOINTGOV Special Warfare troops and Soviet Spetsnaz wreaked havoc behind enemy lines. Other special operations personnel, CDO and WARPAC, silently monitored launch sites of enemy nuclear-tipped IRBMs, ready to pounce at the first sign of a launch.

On other fronts, in Guangxi Province, the inter-Manchurian border, the Mongolian border, and Central Asia, JOINTGOV/CDO and SOVIET/COMECON troops faced each other warily, but did not open fire – or, when they did, they stopped as soon as orders came down the command chain. That sometimes took hours, during which hundreds of men and women became casualties.

Betty continued to watch the Valentina Tereshkova, her finger an inch from the fire controls.


	8. Detonation

14th October 1984

Mirror Attachment Beam 5

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

Ron looked up once more at the gigantic meatball-shaped, coal-black asteroid that hung over him. 150 meters – 1.5 football fields in diameter, the low-density rock massed over five million metric tons. A carbonaceous chondrite, the asteroid was rich in ices and weird tarry stuff – the feedstocks for life, propellant, and space plastics. Nonetheless, like most inner solar system bodies, it was still mostly metal and rock.

In freefall, with scant millions of metric tons of other asteroids around it to be attracted to, the massive rock weighed almost nothing, and was easily stabilized by a few iron beams and light metal netting.

The charred surface of the asteroid was a testament to the hundreds of multi-megaton shaped nuclear explosives (larger cousins of the kiloton-range bombs that propelled nuclear pulse battleships) that had been used to alter the rock's orbit.

The efforts of the prospecting team that had deemed the rock suitable for redirection were also visible. A small abandoned habitat module, out of place among the rock of the asteroid and the orderly support beams of the installation, protruded awkwardly from the lip of a small crater, as if about to fall off the edge of the asteroid.

Ron shuddered as his team of press-ganged strikers moved along Beam 5, creeping ever closer to the point where the asteroid was anchored to the station. Below, a giant overturned mylar bowl fell away, shading the precious ices from the evaporating glare of the sun.

Far above, a glorious full earth, four times wider than a full moon, glowed softly in the pitch-black sky.

He looked at the asteroid again, and repeated Kim's counterpoint in his head. "It weighs nearly nothing; it's not going to crush me. It weighs nearly nothing; it's not going to crush me. It weighs nearly nothing; it's not going to crush me."

His instincts still told him the rock was going to squash him like a bug.

He looked down, and tried to focus on the task at hand: inspecting Beam 5, Mirror 5, and associated structures for sabotage.

Randomly assigned pairs of workers were checking every nook and cranny for bombs, damage, or contraband. Since the possibility of two randomly assigned workers both being involved with the same illegal activity (or sabotage) was remote, and all comms were open, this system kept everybody honest.

So far, they had found three vacuum stills, a stash of stolen tools, a stash of food and life support equipment, and, most worryingly of all, a pistol amongst a stash of psychotropic drugs.

Adrena Lynn's voice rang through his suit speakers. "This is a waste of time. Why the heck would the Soviets spend time and treasure to blow up this crappy place! The Powersat Platform's where all the action's at! Heck, if they really wanted to put our knickers in a twist, they'd go for the CARBOX plant at L1!"

The CARBOX plant, one of the largest industrial plants in orbit, produced millions of carbon-oxygen fuel cells every day. These extremely efficient hydrocarbon-consuming fuel cells were used in practically every fossil-fuel-guzzling ship, car, truck, power-plant and non-electric train, and were crucial for the Pacific economy. Some even said that CARBOX fuel cells, and not the Atomic Age, had saved Pacific civilization from collapse by oil depletion.

The Joint Government still had to beg the Soviets and Saudis for oil on a regular basis.

Another voice rang out. "Yeah! What the hell are we doing working! We're on strike, man!"

Voices chorused in agreement.

Ron sighed. "GUYS! If this station blows, you all go with it! We're all in the same boat here! What would you do if I told you that management had skimped on spare parts?!"

Lynn's counterpoint rang in Ron's ear. "That's totally different! Management would totally skimp on spare parts! The Soviets aren't going to waste their time out here! The government just uses 'em as a bogeyman to keep everyone in line!"

Ron looked up at Lynn. She had elected to take a Manned Maneuvering Unit – a thruster pack - and was flying untethered around her partner.

"Look, everyone. We're in the middle of a crisis. Reagan may be posturing. His boys may be ratcheting up tension to scare the Soviets off. Or maybe the Soviet Union started it. I don't know, and I don't care. However this whole mess started, the Soviets are going to try to out-scare us. And one way to scare us is to make little attacks, like shooting down a spy plane, driving a sub near a carrier, or blowing up an insignificant industrial facility in the middle of nowhere. No matter what you think about patriotism, we need to save our own… skins. So get back to work."

The rest of his team – indistinguishable figures in bug-like orange suits - looked at him. Ron suddenly felt very authoritative – an unusual feeling for him.

A voice suddenly rang out in everyone's helmet speakers. "EXPLOSION! DOWN DOWN DOWN!"

A pea-sized chunk of debris grazed Ron's torso, sending him spinning into Beam 5. Ron's head smashed into his padded helmet, and his world went dark.

* * *

Ron opened his eyes, and tried to ignore his splitting headache. The ceiling above was white. His bed was soft, but he wasn't sinking into it like he usually did. He gingerly tried to sit up. It was lighter than usual, and he was able to sit up.

"Ron!"

Kim's voice was urgent, and Ron sprang to an upright position. "I'm awake! I'm awake! Are we late?"

Kim enveloped Ron in a crushing hug, causing him to wince. "Sorry. How're you feeling?"

Ron shook his head. "Like the time I drank an entire bottle of vodka."

Kim chuckled at the memory. "You really should have read the label on that thing."

Ron crossed his arms. "It looked like punch, it smelled like punch, and it tasted like punch! How was I supposed to know that it was vodka?!"

Ron furrowed his brow. "What blew up?"

Kim exhaled. "Someone detonated small bombs – each probably the size of a hand-grenade - on docking tubes 1 through 4. They blew shrapnel all over the place. The station can't off-load water, liquid methane, or liquid hydrogen until the workers get tube 1 back online."

Ron frowned. The docking tubes – tall chimneys that protruded from the back of the station – were nearly a hundred meters long to keep radioactive spacecraft engines far from the station. He'd been at least 150 meters away from the nearest docking tube.

Then he remembered that there was no air in space to slow down shrapnel.

"I have the worst luck, don't I?"

Kim swallowed. "Ron, if that piece of shrapnel had hit you two inches to the left, or if you'd spun twenty degrees more before hitting that beam… you'd have been a goner. You were very lucky."

Ron raised an eyebrow. "Did anyone else get hit?"

Kim shook her head. "You were pretty much the only casualty. Nobody else on EVA got hit, a couple of compartments depressurized slowly, and there was some scrambling to get hull patches, but the damage to the station was minor."

"Do we know who did it?"

"Ed's been receiving donations from the Pacific Freedom Foundation, which USS has investigated for possible ties to the Soviet Union. There's some evidence that Soviet agents may have infiltrated that organization, and are using it as a front. Ed's crew is also the most prolific user of the purloined access keys. The evidence is completely circumstantial and not very convincing."

"How are the repairs going?"

Kim smiled. "Everyone's working double shifts to get the chimneys back online."

"Guess the attack convinced everyone to pitch in, huh?"

Kim's eyes opened wide. Ron didn't know. "Ron… we're at war with the Soviets. They invaded the Czech Republic two hours ago."

Ron groaned.

"Ron, it's okay. Nobody's used nukes yet, orbital defense worked reasonably well, and the war's confined to Europe and Low Orbit. Well, Argentina's invaded Falklands Prefecture, but it's a sideshow. Everyone here is on high alert for sabotage."

Ron groaned again. "I missed the start of World War III! Please tell me I'll get to see the rerun on the news tonight!"

Kim put her hands on her hips. "Rooon…"

"Are they calling it World War III yet? Oh, I can see it now. One day someone will ask me 'What were you doing when World War III started?' and all I'll get to say will be 'I was unconscious.' What'll I tell my grandkids?!"

Kim placed her hands on Ron's shoulders. "Ron, calm down. Everything is going to be okay." She tilted her head. "Come to think of it though, the government's calling it the "Czech War"."

* * *

The news of war had spread across the Solar System at the speed of light.

A second after the war began, Marines on the moon were ordered to defensive positions.

Between five and twenty minutes later, communications officers at the near-earth-asteroid mines started yelling excitedly to their coworkers.

Fifteen minutes later, the frigate JGSS Niu Mowang (Cow Demon King)（牛魔王）, in orbit around Mars, turned its missile racks menacingly towards the Soviet water mine on Deimos.

On Mars's surface, Soviet and Comecon scientists working out of the JOINTGOV settlements and research bases were alternatively confined to quarters or had short and emotional conversations with their Pacific colleagues.

Similar scenes played out forty minutes later among the icy moons of Jupiter.

Eighty minutes later, scientists, technicians and engineers among the moons of Saturn received the news. They hurriedly turned one of their telescopes towards the Earth to watch for the flashes of nuclear explosions – which, for all they knew, could have occurred already.

However, because the speed of human communication is limited by the speed of conversation, not light, many of the Pacific's citizens found out about the war many hours after the scientists and engineers on Titan.

This was not the case on L-5, where the PA had announced the beginning of the war as soon at the news had reached the communications desk.

* * *

As he made his way to the main teleoperations room, Ron noticed a 180-degree shift in the moods of the strikers. He drifted up to Felix, hunched over a console.

"Back to work, eh, Felix?"

"Stoppable! Glad you made it! Technically, we're still on strike. Reagan hasn't decreed the implementation of war labor regulations yet, and management isn't paying salaries. But since those Soviet bastards seem so intent on making sure we can't refuel our ships, we decided to pump some extra water for the storage tanks."

Ron nodded, and turned to the carbonaceous chondrite on the main screen. A set of fresh pipes had been reinserted into the icy rock. Steam produced by the solar mirror was being pumped through one pipe, and water – tarry, dirt-choked, over-mineralized water – was being pumped out the other.

Beside him, two rows of personnel operated robots, monitoring the steam injection process, performing repairs, and conducting inspections.

In the corridor outside, a troop of pod operators – Ed's crew – discussed coordination with free-flying robots in repairs to docking tube 2.

War does wonders for national unity.

* * *

Outside, a pair of binoculars watched the activity around Lagrange-5 with a mixture of interest and fear. As the eyes behind the binoculars finally began to grasp the purpose of the sudden uptick in activity, the fear subsided, to be replaced by disappointment and annoyance.


	9. Poking the Juggernaut

_After closing with the enemy, the final step is to fight him._

 _Ship-to-ship weapons employed by the Strategic Air Command include kinetic energy weapons, nuclear weapons, and lasers._

 _Kinetic energy weapons work by hitting their targets very, very fast. The kinetic energy of the munition alone suffices to destroy the target. The kinetic energy of a fast-moving projectile can often exceed the chemical energy of an equivalent mass of chemical explosive. As such, a warhead is optional. It may merely take the form of a fragmentation charge to produce shrapnel. Kinetic energy weapons include some missiles, certain types of autocannon rounds, and, in the future, railgun rounds._

 _Nuclear weapons include normal nuclear bombs and nuclear lances, both of which are often delivered by missiles. Nuclear bombs must detonate relatively close to their targets to inflict damage, and are of limited utility in deep-space combat. Nuclear lances, or casaba-howitzers, as they are sometimes called, are specialized shaped nuclear charges. Upon detonation, they produce a spear of plasma powerful enough to destroy ships, space stations and even cities. The reach of the spear varies greatly depending on the yield of the lance. Typical ranges are between ten and five hundred kilometers._

 _Lasers produce narrow beams of very intense light, which can burn through ship hulls and enemy munitions in seconds. Their effective ranges are very impressive – on the order of hundreds of kilometers. However, this effective range is substantially shorter than that of missiles. In deep space combat, lasers appear primarily useful as defensive weapons at the present time._

 _Excerpt, "Video Introduction to the SAC Space Operations Group", produced by the Joint Government Air Force in 1971_

* * *

14th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

It had been six hours since the beginning of the war. So far, nobody in high orbit had made a move. With all communications on both sides restricted to tightbeam, there was no chatter to listen to.

Chongqing squawked. "Spacecraft commanders, this is Chongqing. Please be advised, bandits inbound to JGSS Juggernaut. Possible provocation run. Keep your itchy fingers off those triggers."

A pair of Soviet missile destroyers had maneuvered to place themselves on trajectories intersecting with that of the JGSS Juggernaut a day earlier. Unwilling to expend propellant for a mere provocation, the Juggernaut had not reacted. Now that there was a war on, the enemy maneuver had taken on a new significance.

"Paloma, put the Juggernaut on screen. Keep the secondary imager on the Valentina."

Paloma complied, and the main screen changed to show two dots slowly closing on a third, now scarcely eight hundred kilometers apart. On the left and right were the bandits, nuclear thermal missile destroyers (as indicated by the giant hot hydrogen plume on IR). In the middle was the nuclear-pulse-propelled cruiser JGSS Juggernaut, patrolling near the 2:1 resonance orbit complex.

In a normal, standup fight, the ~400-tonne missile destroyers would be no match for the ~5000-tonne Juggernaut. With her large delta-vee, 60-m-long railgun (firing rocket-boosted, guided rounds or bundles of flechettes), huge UV free-electron lasers, and massive stores of missiles, the Juggernaut could outrun and outgun the missile destroyers. Heck, the Juggernaut even had the mass budget for _armor ._ Very lightweight armor, but it was armor all the same _._

But this wasn't a standup fight. The rules of engagement were unclear, the Juggernaut was under orders to avoid escalation, and the enemy had closed to well within antimissile range.

A hundred-plus dots – rocket motor flares – peeled off each dot, and closed with the center. The Soviet missile destroyers peeled off, thrusting valiantly to get away from the vengeance the Juggernaut might exert.

Probes? Nukes? An attack on SAC's fleet would be system-wide, would it not? Wargames predicted that isolated attacks would not be useful until the negotiating phase of the war. During that phase, they would allow Red to demonstrate to Blue that its possessions were not safe and peace was a better option. Then again, wargames throughout history had a sketchy record when it came to making predictions. Or was that just selection bias?

The JGSS Juggernaut began maneuvering, great flashes of nuclear fire propelling it away from the pursuing missiles. The missiles – probably shaped like hot dogs with four buns like Betty's own missiles – thrusted on chemical jets as they chased their target. Both sides trained telescopes on the engagement, obtaining as much information as possible about enemy capabilities.

Unwilling to expend the delta-vee to evade the missiles, the Juggernaut began deploying countermeasures. Radar and lidar sweeps sought out projectiles, aided by timed nuclear explosions.

At five hundred kilometers, the five-meter multi-megawatt free-electron lasers of the Juggernaut opened up, shredding scores of inbound missiles.

Antimissiles were next, slamming into the inbound bogeys at kilometers per second, blasting them to dust or forcing them to maneuver.

At one hundred kilometers, the Juggernaut began evasive maneuvers. Between the propulsive nuclear flashes, caseless autocannon rounds (which expanded into large spinning mesh nets as they left their barrels) filled the black sky.

Betty turned the telescope/laser back towards the Valentina, certain that this was a distraction preceding a systemwide attack.

Two seconds later, at ninety kilometers, the surviving missiles turned around, boosted away from the Juggernaut, and self-destructed.

Thirty seconds later, the Juggernaut commanded its munitions to self destruct – after they had elicited a response from the enemy's lasers.

Five minutes later, with no harm having befallen the Juggernaut and no injuries (all personnel having been strapped in for the expected encounter), Chongqing squawked to confirm that it had been a very serious provocation.

Betty, hoping to reassure her crew, was the first to speak. "A couple dozen missiles got through the laser screen, but they probably wouldn't have gotten closer than fifty klicks."

Betty got blank stares from her crew. Fifty klicks was nuclear lance range. At 10-50 kilometers, a specially shaped nuclear bomb could ram a lance of superhot plasma at the Tieshan Gongzhu – frying it permanently. The Juggernaut was one of the newest cruisers in the fleet, optimized for conventional warfare in space. If it could have been fried by Soviet missile destroyers, what chance did they stand?

Betty forced a smile. "If the enemy had been forced to engage from further off, or if the Juggernaut had brought her railgun into play against the enemy at extreme range, or if the Juggernaut had gotten her antimissiles in the air sooner, it would probably have played out differently. We're also a lot harder to hit than the Juggernaut, and…"

Noah tilted his head, Sparky looked up, and Paloma shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

"…and I've got one of the best crews in the Solar System. We'll make it, and we'll kick their Soviet asses while doing so!"

Paloma pumped her fist in the air. "Today we're Air Force, Tomorrow we're Space Navy! Hooah!"

Paloma pumped her fist in the air again, and Noah and Sparky joined in. "Hooah!"

Betty chucked at the old joke. "Let's not let those air-breathers get all the glory! Back to your screens!"


	10. Revelations

15th October 1984

ARC Resource and Extraction Facility

Lagrange 5

"KP! Middleton just called in with intelligence files of all the people on-station! They've beamed them up so we can access them on the station terminal!"

"Seriously? How'd they get all the files together so quickly? The people on-station are from at least sixty provinces!"

Kim's mind boggled at the effort it would have taken to transcribe the files onto SECNET, USS's private corner of the ARPANET supercomputer network.

"We're at war! Sabotage is a big deal!"

"It must have been if ARC let them use the company computer network."

"ARC is cutting-edge! They linked their company net to ARPANET!"

Kim and Ron floated into the station's computing room. In front of them, a huge Babbage-Lovelace supercomputer (running on "software" from Turing Thinkomatics) silently monitored the functions of every part of the station, intelligently identifying the most pressing problems and sending them to the main operations room. Kim floated to a cutting-edge computerized workbench with integral teleprinter, and Ron joined her.

The black-and-white cathode ray tube flicked to life, and Kim, reading off the attached manual, typed in commands for the unit to retrieve recent data packages from ARPANET. She found the megabyte-sized text file and typed in commands to read it and decrypt it. The large file had been quickly transmitted by high-bandwidth communications lasers and fiber-optics designed for radio interferometry work, and was easily stored on the station's magnetic disks.

The text reports began with a short list of suspects, produced by a team of analysts on Earth. Intensive interrogation would be warranted with each.

* * *

"So, Mr. Chu. You had access to the stolen key?"

The spindly, heavily-tanned Han Chinese man spoke with a distinctive Cantonese accent.

"Yes. All senior staff on the EVA repair team did too."

"You used the stolen access key often?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you use your own?"

"It would have been logged by the system. I would have been reported. The stolen key was an emergency drill training key. Emergency drills are low on the computer system's priority. Airlock use with the key is not flagged to main ops."

Kim raised an eyebrow, and the spindly man crossed his arms.

"Main Ops has five people. They are too busy to watch the many airlocks here. Airlocks are left unlocked for safety reasons, but opening without keys flags alarms. The emergency drill key does not."

"Safety reasons?"

"Accidents happen on EVAs, and people need to be able to get back in quickly, through the nearest airlock. We also train to abandon the station without docking tubes. There's nobody outside for four hundred thousand klicks!"

"Okay. What did you use unauthorized EVAs for? Drugs? Stolen equipment?"

"I like walking on the sunlit side of the station. I like EVAs, but most of our time is spent behind the mirrors and big solar array. It's completely dark where we work except for floodlights. All that empty space – and no sun. It wasn't just me. Adrena Lynn and Chloe Jain also did spacewalks for fun."

* * *

Ron stared at the blond woman across the table, her arms folded across the front of her jumpsuit.

"Mrs. Lynn, you are senior repairman on shift 3, are you not?"

"Yes."

"I've heard that you like EVAs, and took a few unauthorized leisure spacewalks. Personally, I hate freefalling. I hate parachute drops and null-gee EVAs. Moonwalks are fine, but spacewalks freak me out."

Lynn tilted her head. "What on earth are you doing out here, then?"

"Trying to get to know you better. Did you steal equipment and deal drugs on the side?"

"Heck no. All I did was admire the sunshine and give a go at free-climbing in space. Freaky!"

"Free-climbing in space?"

"Oh yeah. Most mining ops take place as close to the station as possible. We don't get to go all the way up to the "top" of the big rocks on EVAs. Me and Chloe free-climbed every asteroid on this place. It's a 200-m climb from mounting point to tip. No tethers, no thrusters. Freaky! The view from the top blows you away."

Ron shuddered inwardly as he remembered the feeling of crawling beneath a giant, meatball-shaped asteroid, and Lynn chuckled.

"That feeling of vertigo when you're still near the bottom section is awesome."

Ron turned somewhat green, and Lynn laughed.

"Okay. I'm better now. How the heck did you free-climb in those bulky orange suitports?"

"Oh, I have my own suit. Skintight and fully certified. Not illegal or forbidden under corporate rules – which is silly since you're only supposed to use company suits."

"Well, sounds normal to me. What isn't forbidden is permitted and all that. Did Chloe have a suit?"

"Once she found out how much more awesome it was to free-climb in a skinsuit, she got one for herself."

Corporal Adyson Sweetwater floated into the room. "Excuse me, Agent Stoppable?"

Ron turned around, and two other people drifted into the room – one somewhat unsteadily, and one with confidence. The first was a dark-haired Caucasian man in a blue trench-coat with a small ponytail, a scar on his face, and a sheaf of papers in his hands. The other was a striking raven-haired woman, also Caucasian, in a green-and-black business pantsuit.

Nobody wears skirts in zero-gee, where there is no downward force to keep skirts in modest positions.

The Marine, clad in fatigues and an orange beret, continued. "They came up here on a fast shuttle from Earth. Their paperwork checks out. They want to see Agent Possible. I thought I'd run it through you first."

Ron turned back to Lynn, who appeared somewhat surprised by the intrusion.

"Thank you for your time, Mrs. Lynn."

* * *

"So Chloe, was it your idea to use the stolen key?"

The Indian grimaced. "No, it was Adrena's. She wanted to bask in the sunshine and freeclimb the rocks, and she needed a partner for both those things. I was interested, so I signed up. Is this going to get me fired?"

Kim smiled. "It won't go on your criminal record, but I don't know how corporate…"

Ron floated into the room, and motioned for Kim to leave. Kim frowned, but promptly unstrapped herself from her chair. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Jain."

* * *

Kim and Ron floated facing the new arrivals as Chloe left the makeshift brig/interrogation center. The man in the trenchcoat spoke first.

"Ms. Possible. I'm Dr. Lipsky. This is my associate, Shego. I'm here for my cousin, Edward Lipsky."

"Mr. Lipsky, I have not received any instructions regarding the release of your cousin."

"But you let all your other suspects go! Surely my cousin is no more a threat to state security than…"

The raven-haired woman – Shego (which couldn't be a real name) – cut him off. "Bup, bup, bup, I'll do the talking. Listen here, princess. I don't care what USS found in Ed Lipsky's finances or background or politics, or what Ed did in college. All I know is that I have a piece of bureaucrat paper which orders you to let Ed go."

Shego waved a document, emblazoned with the logo of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), in Kim's face. Kim grabbed it, reading through it carefully.

"I'll have to call my boss."

Ron and Dr. Lipsky looked at each other uncomfortably as Kim floated away to talk on her boxy satphone.

"My boss says the codeword ECHO BABYKINS is legit. But since he has no idea what Intelligence is doing on Security turf, I'm going to have to ask you to tell me what the heck you're up to."

Dr. Lipsky's face grew into a broad grin, and he began. "Well it's very simple really; I'm here to oversee…"

Shego slapped a gloved hand across the doctor's mouth. "We're Intelligence. We don't take orders from Security."

Kim's eyes narrowed.

"Shego, don't pick fights with Security! They can wiretap your phone, or break into your house and steal all your research notes!"

"Well so can I!"

"Shego! I spent years working on this and I finally have authorization to gloat about my scheme to someone who hasn't already read the report!"

Kim tilted her head.

"Well, err… Ah, yes! My name is Andrew Lipsky, and I work for the Applied Scientific Corporation's defense division, Applied Defense. We sell nuclear bombs, particle-beam weapons, and missiles."

Ron spoke. "I thought Applied Scientific sold thermostats, Large Hadron Colliders and nuclear reactors."

Dr. Lipsky nodded. "We sell those too."

Shego elbowed Dr. Lipsky. "Oh yes, my scheme! As you are all aware, over the past five years, the Asteroid Recovery Consortium has moved more than forty million metric tons of material into L-5. You should also know that from this altitude, a tonne of rock nudged to impact Earth possess kinetic energy equivalent to ten tonnes of TNT."

Ron nodded. "The Belgium-killing rocks were one of the justifications we made for getting a squad of Marines out here, yeah."

Dr. Lipsky grinned, and continued. "I, with the assistance of a covert team of machine operators…"

Kim raised an eyebrow. "Your cousin Ed and his crew?"

"…a covert team of machine operators, drilled precise holes in each of the asteroids here. In times of crisis, small nuclear explosives can be emplaced into each hole, and detonated to gently move the asteroids away from the station. At that point, larger shaped nuclear charges stored clandestinely on this station can be detonated from precise directions. This will drop the asteroids into orbits that intersect Earth's surface! KABOOM!"

Kim frowned as Lipsky threw his hands in the air. "What are the advantages of rocks over nukes?"

"A huge Belgium-killing rock is much harder to stop than a Belgium-killing nuke, at least using the laser and kinetic kill systems popular today. Imagine the Soviet Politburo, cowering in the Kremlin, hopeless to divert the course of a ten-million-ton asteroid as it streaks through the sky on a blinding plume of fire! The world will be ours, and there's nothing the Soviets can do within a five-year timeframe to stop us! YA-HA-HA-HA! AH-HA-HA-HA! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

Ron raised his hand. "Uhh… Dr. Lipsky? Didn't the Legislature resolve to forbid the use of ARC's asteroids as weapons of mass destruction?"

Kim, Shego, and Drakken all stared quizzically at Ron.

Kim put her hands on her hips. "Ron, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard."

Shego rolled her eyes. "Never stopped me from training those Venezuelan anticommunist terrorists."

Dr. Lipsky began waving his hands in the air, and began talking in a mocking high-pitched voice. "Oh, no, you can't develop cold stealthy nuclear lances! They're destabilizing! The Soviets probably have them, but they're evil! We aren't evil! Bah! Those bobble-headed popularity-contestants couldn't build a device to assure mutual destruction if they had the entire staff of Lawrence Livermore!"

Kim put her hands on her chin. "Dr. Lipsky, how did you conceal your covertly-drilled holes?"

Dr. Lipsky shrugged. "Ed told everyone they were for geological surveys, which was partially true. A more seasoned eye might discover that they were wider than necessary for surveys. A person with measuring instruments might have been able to conclude that the holes were drilled to fit a nuke but were in the wrong places for mining charges. But nobody ever clambers onto the asteroids except during busy mining operations or geological surveys, and spy satellites can't get close enough for proper measurements."

Kim and Ron looked at each other with alarm, and flew out of the room. Correctly assessing the situation, Shego followed suit. Dr. Lipsky looked blankly at the door. "Uhh… where's everybody going?"

"Stay here, Doc!"

"Oh. Err… I'll go get cousin Eddie, then."


	11. Pursuit

15th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

Kim barked orders into her earpiece (attached to her satphone by a slim wire) as she barreled down the corridors of the station. "Lieutenant, apprehend Adrena Lynn immediately. She may be the saboteur, and she may be armed. She left the brig five minutes ago."

"The EVA team leader? Fireteam moving. Checking. Do you want a public alert?"

"No. Keep it quiet."

Kim arrived at the station's main corridor, and stopped as she awaited the results of Isabella's search.

"Bingo! She went into the hab section four minutes ago!"

Kim raced for the hub of the spinning hab section. If she could get there before Lynn, she could be certain of cutting her off. In the distance, she saw a mop of blond hair turn out of her sight.

"Agent Possible, Lynn just left the hub with a backpack. Turned left onto the zero-gee basketball court."

"Get two Marines to cut her off from the other side!"

In main ops, Isabella barked orders to her Marines, and two peeled off.

In the net-protected area beneath the 3-D court (a refurbished cylindrical Saturn-II fuel tank), Adrena Lynn watched the game, her hand never far from her backpack and her eyes never far from the corridors. She saw the inbound USS agents, and bolted.

"She's bolting!"

Lynn pulled an odd machine-pistol from her bag.

The black machine-pistol had three side-loading vertically stacked smoothbore barrels, each perforated with thin-plastic-covered vents. Each barrel was loaded with twelve self-propelled, electronically-fired rocket bullets loaded point-to-end. The long barrels extended backward well beyond the electronic trigger to serve as a stock. The gyrojet-metalstorm-configuration chosen meant that the machine-pistol needed no special lubricants, had excellent range, had nearly no recoil, and, with no moving parts save the trigger, was extremely rugged – perfect for the rigors of space.

It also outgunned Kim and Ron's caseless pistols by a substantial margin.

Kim, Ron, and Shego ducked as Lynn sent a burst of rocket bullets down the hall. In the court, personnel panicked, comically hiding behind basketball nets, fluorescent lights, and other fixtures.

Lynn backed down the corridor, firing occasional bursts to suppress return fire.

A pair of Marines entered the gym, and two more appeared behind Kim. They returned fire, forcing Lynn to take cover.

Kim and Ron moved up to the gym, and under the cover of the Marines' caseless assault rifles advanced to the airlock.

The outer airlock door opened, and a ghastly whooshing noise reverberated through the corridor as air leaked through damaged suitports – their helmets shot to pieces by Lynn to stall her would-be pursuers. The outer airlock door closed, and the ghastly noise ceased.

* * *

Lieutenant Isabella Garcia-Shapiro turned on the PA system. "Attention all personnel. EVA specialist Adrena Lynn has opened fire on Marines attempting to apprehend her. She has just exited airlock 3a. She is armed and dangerous, and may be our saboteur. All personnel should mass in designated security zones as per terror attack response protocols. Personnel on EVAs should reenter the compound through the nearest airlock."

She called Teleops. "Teleops, this is Lt. Garcia-Shapiro. Keep your bots outside and track Lynn!"

Isabella had a brainwave. "Gretchen! Get me the IR tracking telescope! Sweep the station!"

Isabella cursed her dearth of personnel. Securing this station would have been much easier with a full platoon, rather than the reinforced squad she had at her disposal.

Gretchen soon yelled back. "She's on Rock 3! The metallic one directly starboard!"

* * *

Lynn grunted as she clambered up rock 3, a 7-megaton metallic asteroid that was nearly 90% iron. The very thermally conductive surface of the freezing rock chilled her skinsuit-clad fingers to the bone. She once again cursed her decision to pick rock 3 as her bolt-hole. It was nearest to the hab module, and did not require a long climb along exposed beams (unlike the more distant asteroids), but boy was it hard to climb!

* * *

Kim, Ron, Shego and two Marines stepped out of airlock 3c. Ahead of them, the arms attaching the hab modules to their hubs passed upwards and downwards like the arms of a two stacked contra-rotating windmills. If Ron looked port, he could see the main hub. The two ten-meter-wide high-maintenance engineering masterpieces each sprouted four arms, arranged like the spokes of a wheel.

The sun was directly beneath him, and it cast odd shadows against the arms, giving the whole scene a surreal quality. Three bulky orange semi-rigid suits (with even bulkier MMU-style thruster packs) darted to Ron's starboard. One orange-clad figure, hefting a long tether roll, darted left, towards the spin hub.

"Kim! Adrena Lynn's the other way!"

"Ron, go with Shego! My beacon's on. If I drift off, get a tug to pick me up!"

"What?!"

"Go!"

* * *

Kim stood on one side of the spin hub, the center of the giant windmill-shaped habitat sections. In front of her was the spin section, which spun past her at a leisurely pace of twice or thrice a minute.

Kim found a tether fixture on the spinning section, clipped her long tether to it, and jumped off the spinning section as hard as she could. She felt her tether go taut, released the tether brake, and watched with satisfaction as the tether continued to lengthen as she sped away from the hub.

Objects like to move in straight lines. In order to make them move in circles, force – centripetal force - must be applied, from above or below the object, towards the center of the circle.

Inside a spinning habitat module, the force to keep the space workers moving along with the habitat module in circles comes from the floor. The floor presses upwards on the workers, the workers are pressed downward on the floor, and you get spin gravity.

The same applies for a stone in an old-fashioned sling – the kind David used to slay Goliath. A sling is a long band of cloth, folded into a loop, with a rock in the crook of loop, whirled around your head at great speed. The rock is kept whirling by the piece of cloth, which supports it with tensile force. At the right moment, the piece of cloth is released, the loop is undone, and the piece of rock, no longer forced to move in circles, moves in a straight line, tangential to the circle, at great speed.

Don't try this at home, kids. Sling-fired projectiles can crack skulls, and were used extensively in the ancient world as ranged weapons of war as a result.

In the impromptu giant sling that Kim had made from the spin hub, Kim was the rock, her seventy-meter tether was the piece of cloth, and the whirling spin hub was the arm.

At the right moment, Kim cut her tether and was flung into the inky black sky.

* * *

Lynn had chosen to climb along the "fore" side of the rock, corresponding to the side of the installation from which the spinning habitat sections jutted. From her vantage point, she could see the spinning habitat sections, the short beam leading up to rock 3, and much of the facility while remaining behind cover – provided by the lips of small craters in the asteroid.

Two bright-orange figures appeared on the beam. Lynn swore, took aim, and started shooting.

* * *

"Gahhh! Get behind the beam! Go! Go! Go!"

The quartet retreated under the beam, and continued to slowly advance. Rounds smacked into the beam, and coolant hissed through ruptured pipes. A small inflatable personnel tube ruptured and deflated as it lost pressure.

The beam was good concealment, but it made for poor cover.

* * *

A pair of bullets impacted a rock ten meters from Lynn. A pair of Marines, clad in grey-and-black military hardsuits, had joined the firefight from their vantage point on a docking tube some four hundred meters away. One Marine got careless, and drifted out of the shadow of the mirrors, momentarily illuminating her like a star.

Lynn took aim through her scope, and put three rocket bullets through Private Kallie Patel, killing her instantly.

* * *

Shego barked orders as she clambered atop the huge solar-heated metal refinery. "Lynn's on the other side! Cut her off! Marines from the back, us up front! Use the rock for cover!"

The two Marines nodded with their hands, and departed.

"Gah! How the heck did she climb this thing!" The rock was cold, had precious few handholds, and only occasional tether points. Worse, the geometry of the tiny, gravity-free world – with a horizon twenty meters away – was extremely disorienting to minds that had evolved on the savanas and treetops of Africa, Earth.

Ron saw something flash by, but it was gone before he could identify it.

* * *

Hitting an asteroid at twenty meters per second is the equivalent of hitting a train travelling at seventy kilometers per hour. It is not survivable.

Kim, however, aimed for and hit Lynn. As Lynn was similar in mass to herself and unanchored to the rock, the impact sent both women skidding onto the floor of the crater before bouncing off into space, keeping the forces involved within survivable limits. Lynn, disarmed, tried to grapple her opponent, but despite her softsuit's greater agility, was quickly overpowered by the more experienced agent.

Kim successfully put Lynn into a chokehold, secured Lynn's legs with her own, and placed her helmet against Lynn's.

"If you don't stop wriggling, I'm cutting your air hose."

Kim heard a soft crunch, transmitted through her helmet, as Lynn bit down hard on the cyanide capsule disguised as a fake tooth.

"Lynn! What do you know about this station?! Do you have other contacts?!"

Lynn stopped moving. "I'm not telling you anything, Possible! I'll be dead in two minutes!"

Kim jabbed Lynn in the abdomen – hard.

"Ha! I've been on high-dose aspirin for the last fifteen minutes! I've got the bends! Didn't pre-breathe before using this low-pressure suit! My fingers hurt like heck! Do you think a little jab is going to make me talk?!"

Kim jabbed Lynn's abdomen again, and Lynn groaned. Lynn looked up at the brilliant glare of the sun, and looked down at the full Earth below. Stars emerged by the millions as her vision adjusted to the darkness.

"Possible, I'm in this for the thrill. And this… is FREAKY!"

Lynn stopped moving not long after that.

The tug took five minutes to arrive, and another five to make it back to the station. Kim kept a tight hold on Lynn's body throughout, fearful of losing any evidence that might be on her – on it.

* * *

Ron tried to find Kim amongst the millions of stars that littered the inky-black sky. "Asteroid's clear. Tug's on its way to get Kim – and Lynn's body."

Private Sweetwater spoke up. "What the heck was Lynn doing out here? Unless she packed O2 up here, she'd have been dead within hours. If she packed water, she might last a few days. But since these suits have no chow-locks, she'd have died of hunger eventually."

Ron face-palmed his helmet, leaving dust on the glass. "Guys, check the hab module."

Sweetwater came on the line. "What hab module?"

"The one the prospectors left on the rock. It's been here without maintenance for five years, and it's been nuked to hell, but it may still be serviceable. Lynn might have repurposed it for a bolt-hole."

Shego found the hab module – a repurposed propellant tank the size of a bus - on the light-colored, un-nuked side of the rock.

"Ah. The hab module has a transponder antenna. That's why it never got nuked. Checking for booby-traps…"

There were none. Shego was the first to enter the tiny airlock. Ron followed.

Ron made a beeline for the larder. "It's stocked. Lynn would have had enough food for a month. Oooh! Vienna sausages, Lasagna MRE… Oh, boy, she has Baked Pork Chop Rice! Woah! Pop Pop Porter's frozen space treats! These aren't available in the cafeteria! How did she get these things?"

"Probably the same way she got these."

Ron turned to see what Shego was looking at, and his eyes practically popped from their sockets. Behind the panel were several rows of explosive packs, a cache of light weapons...

...and a dozen or so 50-kg Brilliant Pebble anti-ship missiles.


	12. The First Space Battle (1)

15th October 1984

Barents Sea

The escalation had been intentional. The carriers JGS Zhou Enlai and JGS Franklin D. Roosevelt had been forced to retire from the Mediterranean due to heavy damage (the Roosevelt under tow). A REFORGER convoy, escort and all, had been sunk by a Soviet submarine wolf-pack in the North Atlantic.

The Navy needed prestige and wanted payback.

On the 15th, the Navy had been given the go-ahead for Operation RIGMAROLE. A submarine group sank a Soviet surface action group in the Barents Sea. Part of the Arctic Ocean, the Barents Sea was one of the Soviet Navy's bastions – secure seas where Soviet ballistic missile submarines could safely hide, protected by minefields, surface action groups, attack submarines, and aircraft.

The loss of the Soviet surface force allowed JOINTGOV maritime patrol drones and aircraft to briefly operate over the Barents, while navalized FA-22C/Ds and F/A-14F Tomcats from the carriers JGS Deng Xiaoping kept Soviet interceptors at bay.

Guided by top-secret satellite-mounted lidar systems, they hit pay dirt almost immediately.

A Typhoon-class ballistic missile sub, three Delta IV-class ballistic missile subs, and four Kilo-class diesel-electric attack subs were sunk before Soviet surface action groups chased the Navy from the Barents on the morning of the sixteenth. The Navy had lost a destroyer, a frigate, two attack submarines, half a dozen patrol aircraft, and five fighters. Only one pilot was recovered from the icy seas of the Barents before the Navy was forced to leave.

The Politburo was incandescent over the loss of four ballistic missile submarines. The Soviet Navy, unable to locate any JOINTGOV SSBNs against which they could vent their fury, was unable to sate their bloodlust. The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, however, had plenty of JOINTGOV strategic nuclear assets in plain sight and within striking distance.

* * *

16th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

Betty was woken from her fitful slumber by the alarm klaxon. Leaping to action, she tore off her blindfold, earmuffs, and travel pillow, stuffing them into a plastic bag attached to her crash couch. Around her, Sparky and Paloma performed reactor startup checks.

"Noah, status report!"

"The Val's maneuvering. She's prepping to burn… No, she's burning! She's raising orbit! Heading for the _Vesuvius_!"

Betty slammed down her helmet. "Darn it! They weren't scheduled to do that until three hours from now!"

Noah snorted. "They know we have less delta-vee to burn. This inefficient burn puts them at an advantage. Do we give chase?"

Betty nodded. Defending SAC's continent-killing nuclear pulse battleships was top priority for SAC. The loss of the battleships would significantly weaken JOINTGOV's nuclear deterrent, opening JOINTGOV up to a Soviet first strike. Or so went the theorists.

"Sparky, follow that ship! Noah, tightbeams to Vesuvius and Chongqing! Paloma, we're going on suit air! Depressurize on my mark!"

Betty slammed against the side of her crash couch as Sparky burned methane, and felt her body weigh something again as the ship accelerated. A male voice came in through the crew's helmet speakers.

"JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Chongqing. We've got you and the bandit on screen. You have permission to engage the bandit the moment he shoots."

Betty grunted as she connected her air hose to her seat supply. Chongqing had obviously decided on a more aggressive stance. "Are we all on suit air?"

Four voices chimed in the affirmative. "Paloma, depressurize!"

"Depressurizing. Air's going in the tanks. Reactor's stable. Weapons hot."

Noah turned his head. "Vesuvius on the line."

"Iron Fan Princess, this is Vesuvius. We've changed course so that you can get between us and the bandit. See you in an hour."

"Roger that, Vesuvius. By the way, we go by Tieshan Gongzhu."

"Solid copy, Iron Fan Princess. Over and out."

Betty, scared out of her wits, tried to laugh. "Bastard keeps using the English translation!

Her crew chuckled, and Noah raised his head in fear-addled mirth. "Makes us sound like some kind of manga character!"

Paloma laughed as she monitored the ship's systems. "We _are_ some kind of manga character! The kickass Iron Fan Princess blows the Monkey King and his fellow travelers a thousand klicks away with her superpowered mystical hand fan in _Journey to the West._ She loses to the main characters in the end, but all cool villains do."

Betty chuckled. "It's Chinese, not Japanese. Okay, people. Let's blow those Soviets right out of the sky!"

"Hooah!"

* * *

16th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

Noah watched as the Val made course adjustments with thrusters. "Valentina Tereshkova closing to weapons range. 1200 klicks… 1195… 1190…"

Around him, his three crewmates performed various tasks, faces hidden behind helmets and the darkness of the command module. All were intently focused on the cathode-ray-tube screens in front of them. The red blackout lights of the command module, designed to preserve night vision and enable viewing of dim monitors, added to the palpable sense of foreboding.

"Sparky, can you get us closer?"

Sparky shook his head. "Unless you want to burn a lot of water, this is as close as we get for the next half-hour."

Betty nodded, and pressed a button on her suit radio. "Vesuvius, you may commence your positioning burn."

"Roger that, Iron Fan Princess. Stand by for burn."

A thousand kilometers away, a chain of nuclear explosions went off, each accelerating the 5000-tonne nuclear-bomb-propelled battleship by 50 m/s. The Val burned to reorient.

An alarm beeped, and Paloma killed it. "Radiation alarm. Harmless."

Betty nodded. The "armored", heat-shielded, reentry-capable command capsule would protect them from x-rays created by distant nuclear explosions.

Sparky's squeaky voice came in over the suit radio. "Chief, we're in position!"

Paloma turned to Betty, alarmed. "Attack run, attack run! The Val's burning toward us at three gees!"

Betty cursed the JOINTGOV trade negotiators who had authorized the transfer of liquid-core nuclear rocket technology to the Soviets in exchange for half a billion barrels of Soviet oil. The Tieshan Gongzhu could barely make one gee fully fuelled.

Paloma began yelling. "Vampire, Vampire, Vampire! Fifteen missiles, new type! They're not burning very fast, but that probably means they're high-impulse birds!"

Vampire was the brevity code for enemy anti-ship missile.

Noah smashed down on the ECM button. "Enemy jammer, enemy jammer! Countering! Music on!"

Betty worked her console. "Salvo Fox two. Antimissiles away. Salvo Fox Two. Bruisers away."

Her crew's voices sounded tinny on Betty's too-loud suit speakers. She cursed combat depressurization protocols. The deck shook slightly as many metric tons of ordinance detached from the Tieshan Gongzhu. Solid boost motors boosted octets of anti-ship missiles – bruisers - towards the Val at fifty gees while antimissiles plodded leisurely forward on maneuvering thrusters.

X-5 beeped, and found a new frequency. Noah tried to image the Val, but his screen filled with flashing lights.

"Light jammer! Light Jammer! Filtering!" The enemy had jammed their lidar and telescope.

Paloma could not believe her screen (still online thanks to the efforts of Noah and X-5). At the speed they were going, the vampires should have burned out a minute ago. "Vampires still burning! Closing fast! What on earth are they using for boost motors!"

Noah could have smacked himself if it hadn't been for the helmet. "They're using nuclear rocket motors on their vampires! The cylinders on the Val were missile propellant tanks!"

Paloma hastily imaged the plume with the spectrometer. Hot hydrogen. Not hot enough. Solid core nuclear rocket. "Noah's right!"

Betty got on the line. "Vesuvius, enemy is employing NTR missiles, repeat, vampires have NTRs and delta-vees of potentially sixteen thousand m/s. Chongqing, Vesuvius, confirm copy!"

How much had the Soviets spent on putting expensive nuclear rocket engines on throwaway missiles? Even SAC's cash-flush bean counters had deemed the concept uneconomical!

The bright side of this was Betty wouldn't have to worry about deciding when to command-detonate her missiles – the Soviet missiles would reach her first.

"This is Chongqing, we copy. You have permission to shoot down the bandit."

"Vesuvius copies."

Paloma spoke again. "Missile buses have split! Two hundred eighty eight bogies! Impact with us sixty seconds! Impact with Vesuvius one hundred seconds!"

Betty exhaled. The bogies would spend 20-40 seconds in range of the lasers - far fewer than previously expected, and inadequate to destroy all the bogies with certainty.

She modified the trajectories of her own anti-ship missiles, and reassigned half her missiles to anti-missile duty.

Paloma turned her head. "Betty? With barely sixty missiles after her, the Val's going to shoot them all down."

"Watch your screen, Lieutenant Ramirez! Prioritize missiles inbound for us!"

A hit on the Tieshan Gongzhu would mean less firepower available to shoot down the missiles inbound to the Vesuvius.

"Missile crossover in five, four, three, two, one…"

Betty watched as her salvo of missiles and the enemy missiles closed at six hundred kilometers. Forty pairs of missiles collided, blossoming into pinpoints of light.

Noah yelled. "Betty! The bandit's still inbound! One thousand klicks and still burning!"

A shriek came through Noah's helmet speakers. "They just jammed us again! Countering… Never mind! Dropping probes and decoys!"

For all the good it did the Tieshan Gongzhu, Noah was reasonably certain that he was jamming the enemy's radars and communications. The intensity of the enemy's ECM, however, had taken him by surprise.

"Laser on! 1 down. 2. 3. 4." Paloma began counting the bogeys shot down, and Noah fought the urge to close his eyes as he focused on hosing the inbound missiles with infra-red jammers and false radar returns. A few stupid missiles, infra-red cameras blinded by flashing IR lasers and unable to find any shapes, fell for the trick, peeling away towards the decoys.

Betty yelled for Sparky to gun it, and Noah was pressed into his seat by two-thirds of a gee of acceleration. This would force enemy missiles to either attack the Vesuvius or the Tieshan Gongzhu, but also rendered decoys useless.

It's hard to outshine a twenty-gigawatt reactor.

* * *

Theoretically, a three-megawatt 190 nm UV free-electron laser with a 5-m mirror is an unbeatable death ray with stupendous range. At five hundred kilometers – a little less than the distance between Winnipeg and Moose Jaw - such a laser can burn through five centimeters of titanium armor plate per second. Because laser effectiveness increases exponentially with decreasing distance, at one hundred kilometers, this increases to six meters of titanium per second.

In practice, against spinning, mirror-buffed, and maneuvering missiles with fuel tanks less than a millimeter thick, such a laser is only effective at about two or three hundred kilometers – especially when fired from a jinking platform.

* * *

Paloma was counting off five or six missiles per second now. The autocannon swung to track missiles.

Paloma's voice was tight. "Fifteen seconds to impact…"

Betty blinked. If this was a provocation – which, given that the enemy had expended some very expensive hardware, was unlikely – the enemy missiles would back off any second now. If this was an engagement… it would probably end up in the history books. As an incident if they were lucky, as the opening shots of a war if they were not.

"Sparky, jink thrusters. Brace for impact!"

Computer-controlled systems have much superior reaction times to humans. In the space of three seconds, the autocannon mounted opposite the laser on the Tieshan Gongzhu's spine had directed eighteen bursts of fire at the nearest twenty-one surviving missiles (all coming from approximately the same direction). The caseless autocannon rounds were not decoy infra-red emitters this time, but spinning mesh rounds which expanded into four-meter-wide spinning nets in the airless vacuum of space. Travelling at the slowpoke speed of one kilometer per second, they would intercept enemy projectiles tenths of a second from impact.

The surviving handful of Soviet projectiles never gave them the chance. At forty kilometers, they detonated into unstoppable clouds of ball-bearings.

"Buckshot, buckshot, buckshot!"

Sparky pressed hard on the stick, and Betty was thrown upwards against her seatbelt. Missiles might have been able to follow the tiny last-minute maneuver, but dumb buckshot could not.

A ghastly ripping noise rang through Betty's chair, alarm klaxons blared, and Betty felt the sensation of freefall return.

The Tieshan Gongzhu was dead in the water.


	13. The First Space Battle (2)

16th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

"Status report! Casualties!"

Noah stared at the tiny black dot, two centimeters across, in the hull a mere foot above his head. Beyond it, he could see stars. He turned towards his friends and crewmates, looking for the exit hole made by the gumdrop-sized ball that had hit the module at ten kilometers per second. He found the large gash on the ceiling almost immediately.

Paloma's voice rang out over the comm. "No casualties. We're all alive. Suit air's good. Reactor's still running… Oh no. We've lost pressure in both tanks. They got holed. Mass readings are 70% of normal. Life support is… offline. Tankage is safe, but the recycler's not responding. Cabin's obviously holed." Paloma pointed as the ceiling.

This was bad. Thirty percent of their water propellant had evaporated into space. The process of evaporation had absorbed enough heat to cool the remainder into slowly sublimating snow.

Sparky reported in. "Maneuvering thrusters A and F offline. I can do without them. Electric thruster cluster 2 is gone. Inertial Navigation System and sextant are online. I can fly her the moment we patch the tanks."

Betty checked her weapons systems. "Laser's dead. Mirror's broken. Autocannon's alive. Missile pods intact. Backup infra-red search and tracking is good. Noah?"

Noah was still staring at the gash in the ceiling, two feet above Betty's head.

"Lieutenant Parker, report!"

Noah turned back to his screen. "Uhh… we've lost tightbeam and the secondary telescope. Radar's working, but it's being jammed. Link 16 too. X-5's offline. I can't counter. Omni antenna's jammed. We can't squawk to Chongqing or Vesuvius."

Noah hung his head. All the POINTY STICK missions, the years spent studying Soviet technical documents, and the thousands of exercises seemed somewhat moot now. "I'm sorry, Betty. I lost to the guy on the other end. Just couldn't keep up."

Betty had already turned her attention elsewhere. "Paloma, what's the Val doing?"

Paloma had spent the last thirty seconds trying to make out the grainy data coming through the infrared search system, the only sensor system she had left. "It's finished burning for the Vesuvius. Looks like another attack run. Vesuvius is maneuvering to disengage – probably got fragged. They'll engage at one thousand klicks in... ten minutes."

Betty checked her screen. "Huh. They're still in range."

Evidently, the great velocity of the Valentina had yet to carry it all the way across the thousand kilometers that had separated it from the Tieshan Gongzhu.

"Okay, people, they think we're dead. Sparky, burn the thrusters and point us at them quietly."

Betty might have lost Link 16, but she could still point the infra-red cameras of her missiles at the enemy.

Paloma shook her head. "Major, I advise against this course of action. The Val shot over a hundred of our birds out of the sky before they could hit her. We're a sitting duck. The moment we light up, they'll hit us with two or three KEWs, and we'll be dead."

Betty turned towards Paloma, a confident smile on her face. "Not if we kill the Val with a 100-kiloton nuclear lance from three hundred klicks off. All four of our nuclear-tipped Komodos will do the job perfectly."

Paloma unstrapped her harness. "Major, we have standing orders to avoid escalation. Nuclear weapons use is clearly escalatory!"

Betty glared at the Lieutenant. "So is attacking our nuclear deterrent, and nearly killing my crew! Lieutenant Ramirez, strap in and prepare for maneuvers! That's an order!"

Paloma floated to her feet. "No, Major! You will not escalate!"

Betty turned to her console, and overrode the flight controls. "Lieutenant Ramirez, as commander and weapons systems officer, I am authorized to employ anti-ship nuclear weapons beyond Low Earth Orbit without nuclear weapons release orders! Brace for acceleration!" She pointedly looked away from Paloma, and reached for the fire controls.

"Major, take your hands off your station!" Betty felt Paloma shove, and was pushed out of her seat.

* * *

"Paloma, get off me." Betty's voice was firm.

Paloma felt a service pistol shakily press on her shoulder. Noah's voice came on the helmet speakers. "Paloma, what are you doing?"

Paloma's hands shook as she reached for her card. The three-month training course had been as realistic as possible, covering how to deal with treason, mutiny, espionage, insanity and insubordination, but it had not prepared her for this.

The speech. She hadn't gotten to the speech yet. And her card was still in her pocket.

"As the acting Security officer onboard this vessel, I am instructing you to hold your fire."

Her commanding officer raised an eyebrow. "Card?"

Paloma gingerly fished an identification card out of her EVA suit, coated in hard plastic.

Betty read off the card. "Lieutenant Paloma Ramirez, Unified Security Service. Codeword?"

Paloma sighed. "Codeword for JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu is BUBBLES KISSYCUDDLES."

Betty nodded, and Noah lowered his pistol.

"So, Lieutenant Ramirez, are you taking control of the ship?"

Paloma, who had for the past minute been on autopilot, had a helpful idea.

As with many helpful ideas, it would have been much more useful had it occurred to her a minute earlier.

"Betty, I think I have enough time to patch the tanks. The Val's built up quite a lot of relative velocity burning towards us, and if we do an attack run, we might be able to throw our missiles fast enough to overwhelm their laser."

She realized that she hadn't answered Betty's question. "Betty, the ship's still yours."

It certainly didn't feel like it. "Of course, Lieutenant Ramirez. Sparky, Noah, assist Lieutenant Ramirez with repairs. I'll crunch the numbers on the attack run." It was a good idea, but Betty was feeling a little bitter.

"Lieutenant Ramirez. Do you know why the Civilizational Command Authority forgot to tell us that nuclear weapons were off-limits today?!" Sparky's tone was sarcastic, and he pronounced each word separately and sequentially.

Noah walked over, toolbag in hand. "Lieutenant Tong, please do not antagonize our Security officer."

Paloma sighed. "Security concerns. If the Soviets found out we had rescinded nuclear weapons authorization, it might embolden them to strike first. They decided to tell it to Security, and have Security tell local commanders. My instructions were unclear, so I didn't tell you. You can check with Chongqing once we get our hands on a secure line."

Betty opened the airlock. "CINCSAC would probably have fought the order tooth and nail if it had to go through her."

Paloma looked apologetically at Betty as she stepped out into space. "Yeah, that too. By the way, we should stay off the radio if possible. The hull's shielded, but the truss? Not so much."

* * *

Noah slowly crawled down an edge member of the Tieshan Gongzhu's truss, a thirty-five meter tall alloy beam with the cross-section of a shipping container. Behind him was the octahedron of phased array radars that had been his responsibility. Holes and gashes covered the radars, which, by virtue of their solid-state construction, remained functional nevertheless. Before him, the primary laser turret lay damaged, its shroud holed and its mirror cracked. The huge, truck-sized free-electron laser generator buried in the truss had also been damaged, and the ground below Noah hissed with leaking coolant.

Noah looked down, and inspected the bulky autocannon, mounted opposite the laser turret. It was completely intact but for some scoring on its external thermal management cover.

The missile pods (well, missile support frames) behind the laser turret, slanting outward from every face of the truss at 45-degree angles, were surprisingly intact. Paloma took a moment to check the missiles for damage. The bundles of hot-dog-shaped, watermelon-sized Brilliant Pebbles interceptors bolted to big beryllium high-performance solid rocket boost motors were fine. So were the larger interceptors with 100-kt warheads or big bursting charges strapped to their noses.

Sparky inspected a mangled arm where an electric thruster should have been.

They passed the field of munitions. The circular cap of a giant cylindrical water tank loomed ahead. Five meters in diameter and ten meters tall (slightly taller but shorter in length than a double-decker bus), each water tank could hold 160 metric tons of water propellant. The silver surface of the cap was pockmarked by a white blotch – a patch of ice, blocking the exit of the snow remaining in the tanks.

If the Tieshan Gongzhu had been running on hydrogen, the tanks would have been eighteen times the size, and impossible to repair.

Tieshan Gongzhu might not have been a big ship, but it was a far cry from the capsules that dominated the first decades of space travel.

Paloma signaled for Noah and Sparky to touch helmets. Sound might not pass through vacuum, but it was transmitted through plastic and glass just fine. "I'll take the bottom; you and Sparky take the top. Once you're done, come down and I'll test the tank. Remember, stay inside the radiation shadow! Keep your tethers short and don't push off!"

Noah and Sparky nodded. The reactor, while "cold", was still dangerously radioactive, and hard radiation spewed from it in every direction except upwards, where a small disc of tungsten created a cone-shaped shadow encompassing the entire ship.

The cockpit was still mounted on the end of a forty-meter stick for protection during a burn.

Work proceeded quickly. Sealing patches, no more than very strong thick heat-activated metal stickers, were placed over the holes. Paloma repressurized the tanks with small amounts of nitrogen to check for leaks, and they were on their way back within minutes.

* * *

Most military equipment – materiel – is extensively tested to see how it can be broken by the rigors of combat, and to see how it can be fixed under combat conditions. This is one of the reasons materiel often costs much more than "commercial off-the-shelf" equipment.

For her part, Paloma was glad that the government had paid fifty million too much for the Tieshan Gongzhu. For only military vessels were equipped with the bulky, heavy, and overpriced plumbing that allowed steam to be pumped back into propellant tanks to melt the snow that formed during tank punctures.

"Reactor checklist is good. We are go for tank flush. Ready when you are, guys."

Noah compiled another list of electronic countermeasures, Sparky went through the upcoming maneuver once more in his head, and Betty double-checked her firing solutions on the Valentina, now closing to five hundred kilometers.

Betty turned to Paloma, and nodded. "You are go for tank flush, Lieutenant Ramirez. Sound off as you go."

If they were to have any chance of surviving, they would have to appear dead until the last minute, and then begin their attack run immediately upon going hot. Every second they were hot but stationary was another second they were a sitting duck.

"Okay. Pump is going, sump tank emptying… Reactor startup! We have steam! Pressure and temperature rising in tanks one and two… and we have meltwater! Cycling open! Reactor to full power!"

Betty was pressed into her seat by the single gee of acceleration.

Sparky took over. "We have thrust! Turning and burning! We're going high-gee, people!"

Twice as much water than optimal surged through the reactor, doubling thrust at the expense of halving efficiency.

"Playlist active! ECM is on!"

Betty spotted the grainy dot moving across her black monitor. The targeting computer bracketed it, and she accepted the target. "We have target lock!"

Sparky started screaming as the acceleration approached two gravities – twelve times the gravity the Lunan was accustomed to. The channel automatically cut him off.

The enemy spacecraft began burning, and launched missiles and antimissiles.

"Vampire, Vampire, Vampire. Three NTRs, sixty antimissiles!"

On the bridge of the Tieshan Gongzhu, Betty smiled. The attack plan stood a very high probability of success if the enemy launched fewer than one hundred antimisiles.

The Tieshan Gongzhu came up to two hundred kilometers, having gained just under three kilometers per second. It dropped four conventional Komodo anti-ship missiles, sixty-four Geckos, and three hundred autocannon rounds. The missiles raced towards the enemy vessel at nearly ten kilometers per second of relative velocity.

The Soviet antimissile barrage removed thirty or so missiles, but the very high closing velocities gave the Val far too little time to shoot down the remainder. The inefficient and short-ranged hydrogen-fluoride chemical laser sealed the fate of the Valentina Tereshkova, which suffered three missile hits, each of which tore great gashes in the giant water tank. Shrapnel from one Komodo caught the Val dead-center, peppering it with hundreds of smaller holes.

The Tieshan Gongzhu, a minute out from the wreckage of the Val, still had a minor missile problem.

The three slowly accelerating long-range missile buses of the Val had been designed for long-range engagements. Twenty seconds after launch, they were still slow, bulky, predictable targets with poor maneuverability, and none had dispatched their submunitions – easy targets for Betty's few remaining antimissiles.

A few autocannon bursts were fired at large chunks of debris that got too close for comfort, but the engagement was over.


	14. Interlude

16th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

While uncommon, fatal industrial accidents had been occurring in space since the dawn of the space age. As such, most industrial facilities, including L-5, were equipped with a small body storage locker. The cold, metal-lined, dimly lit space was the temporary resting place of Cpl. Patel, Adrena Lynn, and two workers who had died in an industrial accident a month prior.

"OK, that's it, Agent Possible. According to the x-ray, the body's clean. No implanted metal devices. I'm not trained for autopsies, so you'll have to send the body to the moon if you want a more thorough examination."

"Thank you, doctor."

Kim, teeth chattering, floated out of the body storage locker, and made a beeline for main ops.

* * *

Kim waltzed into main ops, where a docking sequence was under way. Two bent rows of computerized workstations faced away from a supervisor's station, and three large projector screens dominated the room. On the big projector screen, a small, barrel-shaped fast transfer shuttle slowly made its way to a docking tube.

"Okay. Ten meters. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Stop. Good. Robotic arms grabbing. Contact. Check. Pull."

"We're docked. Nothing."

Lieutenant Isabella Garcia-Shapiro sighed, and turned to the supervisor. "Okay, people. Let's wrap it up. We're not doing this a third time." She spotted Kim, and floated over. "Not a squeak. We flew the shuttle all the way out to ten thousand klicks this time. Either Lynn didn't leave behind any nasty surprises for docking ships, or her nasty surprises are under outside control, and whoever's controlling them knows that this shuttle is not a juicy target."

One of the workers, a Filipino-Pacifican, rose to his feet. "So you're saying that there might be another saboteur in our midst?" Heads nodded and arms flexed in agreement across the room.

Isabella turned to her unexpected audience. "Not necessarily. For all we know, the controller might be some Soviet drone operator sitting in a log cabin in Siberia with a telescope and a satellite dish."

Another worker threw her hands in the air. "So we're sitting ducks?!"

Isabella turned to Kim. "Until we can get a ship out here to sweep this place for mines, this installation is unusable. Nobody in the Air Force is going to be willing to put a cargo ship or a cruiser on the line at this installation. We might as well have sat out the war on the sidelines."

Kim tilted her head. "Have you talked to your boss about this? This looks like a job for the Air Force."

"This is a job for a port security company. My girls aren't trained to deal with mines or missiles. Plus, aren't you my boss on this installation?"

Kim rubbed her chin. "I stopped being your boss the moment this sitch changed from being a state security issue to a military security issue. You're a lot closer to the Air Force command chain than I am."

"Grrrr! I am sick of this stupid ambiguous chain of command…"

Isabella barreled off to a workstation, and picked up a phone marked with red tape. Painstakingly connected to a SinoDef encryption box under the desk and an Applied Scientific LPI phased array communications dish on the outside of the station, the phone was the most secure communications device on the station.

"Hi. This is Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro. Is this comm shack, third battalion, Second Marines? No? Where on earth are they? Yes, I know we're on GOOSEBERRY, you can't tell me. This line is encrypted. No, I don't have a communications squad. I am one Louie leading one squad at L-5. I am the headquarters element. Uhhh…"

Isabella shook her head. "This'll take a while, but I'm on the right track. They're trying to bump my call up to the SPACECOM comm shack."

"SPACECOM?"

"Space Command. Unified Combatant Command for space. Obviously, my battalion's been deployed somewhere or the other, and their comm shack has better things to do than coordinate far-flung Marine Presence Units."

* * *

16th October 1984

Peach Orchard Infrastructure Consortium (桃花源基建集團) Ice Mining Installation

Long Shadow (長影)

Lunar South Pole, Luna

桃花源, taohuayuan, is a Chinese metaphor for utopia. It also technically translated to Source of the Peach Flowers, but Peach Orchard's marketing team had deemed the literal translation excessively wordy, the alternative, 'Peach Origin', "too weird", and had gone with the translation of the homophone 桃花園，Peach Orchard.

The inaccuracy of the megacorporation's English name was the furthest thing from the mind of Staff Sergeant Zheng Mingshi, 3rd battalion, 2nd Marine Division, as her Lunar Wheeled Reconnaissance Vehicle bounded over the freezing, ice-containing dirt in the perpetual and absolute darkness of a lunar polar crater. An oversized dune buggy with angular roll bars, four wheels, and a pintle-mounted gun in the back, the LWRV was fast, maneuverable, and cheaply built from lunar materials to semi-commercial specifications.

It was barely a step up from a Toyota technical.

Around her, dozens of scrapers and a few medium-sized bucket wheel excavators scooped thousands of tons of the valuable water ore (i.e. ice-containing dirt) into lumbering teleoperated dump trucks that carted it off to the nuclear furnaces of the Peach Orchard Ice Refinery. There, the ice would be melted, refined into water, ammonia, methane, and other substances, and tanked for transport by mass driver or pipeline.

The hundreds of thousands of tonnes of volatiles that the ice mines of Luna produced every year were essential to the operation of JOINTGOV ships, settlements, and factories across cis-lunar space.

It therefore came as no surprise to anyone when Soviet Spetsnaz teams began shooting at JOINTGOV's water infrastructure.

Already, the mass drivers at both poles had been taken out of commission. Despite being located on relatively flat terrain perfect for defense lasers, the ten-kilometer long sets of delicate electromagnets had proven near-impossible to secure.

The larger industrial facilities had been harder targets for the lightly-equipped Spetsnaz, but massed volleys of rocket bullets fired from the crater rim – adequate to damage delicate machinery - had proven difficult to counter, even with the artillery and air defense lasers at the Marines' disposal.

The semi-mobile artillery and air defense lasers had also proven juicy targets to Spetsnaz snipers. In the airless, low-gee environment of the moon, snipers had achieved record-breaking kills against men and materiel from dozens of kilometers away.

Sgt. Zheng's vehicle bobbed and weaved as her squad charged across the desolate, frozen wasteland. Behind her, the big metalstorm-gyrojet machine gun (firing 20mm grenades) opened up against a Spetsnaz gun position on the crater lip. The poorly-aimed salvo missed, and the enemy returned fire. Kilometers behind her, the semi-mobile laser popped up and down from its armored cover to zap the Spetsnaz, hoping that their bullets would not hit before the laser could get back down.

Sgt. Zheng squeezed off a few pot-shots with her assault rifle before the buggy bounded across the crater lip and into the sunlight. The temperature went up 300 degrees, and a long shadow stretched out from beneath the vehicle. The big machine gun opened up again as additional targets came into view.

An orbiting reconnaissance satellite had picked up a Spetsnaz LRP unit as they massed for a hit-and-run attack up the crater rim. Captain Marcos had responded by ordering artillery strikes (with caseless automatic mortars and 70mm rockets) and deploying 2nd Platoon.

Zheng told her driver to stop the vehicle, and Fireteam A dismounted under the cover of machine-gun fire. Return fire emerged sporadically from behind boulders, foxholes, and small craters.

"Go, Go, Go!" Figures in hardsuits covered in grey digital camouflage ran in spurts to large rocks, kept their heads down most of the time, and emerged occasionally to shoot at presumed sources of fire. The driver of the buggy moved her vehicle frequently, and the gunner hosed bursts as she saw fit. The whole scene was more fear-inducing and chaotic than action-packed.

Inside her space helmet, Zheng could hear nothing but the comm, the muffled report of her weapon, and the sound of her own breathing.

Two more buggies zoomed past the crater rim, and more Marines dismounted to join the fight – hopefully by outflanking the enemy.

Out of the blue, a Soviet buggy – a survivor of the artillery barrage - zoomed out from behind a large rock, and launched a salvo of rockets at the Marines. One buggy was saved by its active defense shotguns, one buggy was spared by luck, and Zheng's buggy detonated into a rapidly expanding hail of shrapnel. Their passage unimpeded by air resistance, fragments caught Zheng and two other Marines right in the back. Zheng fell onto the rock she had been using for cover, her suit's self-sealing layers providing some protection. Ignoring the scratches and dirt on her faceplate, she called for covering fire, and moved to another piece of cover.

Slowly but surely, the enemy fire was slackening. There were more Marines, they had more firepower, and their functioning buggies had allowed them to outflank the enemy.

"Sniper, sniper!"

"Darn! Everybody move to cover!" While they had absolutely no idea where the sniper was, moving around would make his or her job that much more difficult.

"Where the heck is that sniper! Who's taking casualties?!"

"Fireteam C Fireteam C! Gunner and driver down!"

Fireteam C was on the left flank, and the sun was coming from the… left. Zheng made her decision. "Sniper's on the left! Our left flank! Check 'em!"

"Captain Marcos, this is Womp Rat 2. We've got a sniper. Radar up on your mark."

Captain Marcos was stuck in a regolith-covered hab with the technical platoon.

"Womp Rat 2, this is Marcos. We have a picture. Radar up!"

Someone stuck out the squad fire-finder radar, mounted on the end of a six-foot pole, and waved it around, trying their best to be inconspicuous.

Zheng popped her head up, and ducked down as fast as she could.

"We got 'em! Marcos, do you copy!"

"Womp Rat 2, this is Marcos. Fire inbound. Your sniper is four hundred meters east of you, behind a big boulder. Get to cover."

Captain Marcos continued. "Impact in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Splash."

Not a sound could be heard.

"Okay people. Wait for the shrapnel to settle. Fireteam C, Fung, rush the position and use cover on my mark! Everyone else keep the pressure on the Spetsnaz. Mark!"

Zheng bounded forward, taking long, low leaps across the grey, desolate terrain, the sun in her eyes compensated for by the self-darkening glass.

She took potshots at the sniper's position. No return fire met her charge.

"Sergeant! Three Spetsnaz guys just surrendered!"

"We take their surrender when we find their sniper! Stay under cover!"

Zheng continued to pound forward, her boots leaving footprints that, if it were not for human activity, would remain unchanged millennia hence.

She found the sniper's crater minutes later, his aerogel-insulated, regolith-imitating ghillie suit shredded by shrapnel.

* * *

16th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

Isabella floated into the brig – the closest thing to an office Kim had on-station. "Kim, great news. SPACECOM's sending over a frigate, the JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu. The ship'll have phased-array-radars, an autocannon, mines, and drones. Heck, it might even have lidar. We'll have this place swept and fully operational in no time."

Kim nodded. "It'll also deter a Soviet attack. That should reassure the workers."

Isabella shook her head. "Not really. The Tieshan Gongzhu's a badly damaged survivor of a skirmish with a Soviet destroyer. She has no laser and no missiles, and the Soviets know that."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "The workers don't, and we'll keep it that way."

Ron looked aghast. "So we _are_ sitting ducks?! The Soviets can waltz in and take over and there's nothing the Air Force can do to stop them?"

Isabella floated forward. "Ron, relax. The Air Force can get here within a day, and…"

Ron continued to wail. "We'll be dead within a day!"

Lipsky chose that moment to join the conversation.

"Gentlemen, there really is nothing to worry about. Until a full-scale war breaks out up here, the Soviets aren't going to risk their entire space infrastructure for this installation."

"What do you know about the Soviets?!"

"I have common sense."

Shego rolled her eyes.

"Think about it, Mr. uhhh…" He turned to the room. Shego did a facepalm.

Isabella cleared her throat. "It's Stoppable, Dr. Lipsky."

"Think about it, Mr. Stoppable. Under current conditions, what happens if the Soviets seize or destroy this installation?"

Ron looked at Kim for help. Kim mouthed two words.

"Everybody cruises?"

It was Kim's turn to do a facepalm.

Isabella rolled her eyes, and shrugged. "The Air Force instantly blows up the Soviet installations at L1 and GEO. The Soviets destroy our L1 Platforms, the Powersat Platform and the Powersats, and maybe our allies' installations for good measure. The space economy collapses and everybody loses, but the Air Force has ships left while the Soviets don't. Air Force comes upwell in a day or two, blows up the Soviet fleet trying to hold L5, and nukes or blockades this place depending on how much Reagan wants to look good."

"Mr. Stoppable: Do you think the Soviet Union would trade away their entire space infrastructure for a bargaining chip?"

"What if they threaten to drop the rocks?"

"Mr. Stoppable, the Soviets do not have asteroid-killing space battleships. The Air Force does."

"Okay, I'm feeling better now."

Dr. Lipsky crossed his arms. "Well you shouldn't. My points only apply if the Soviets aren't in a mutually destructive full-scale space war. If the balloon goes up – well, goes further up - this station is a softer target than a military rock concert in Fulda."


	15. Intermission

16th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Inclined High Earth Orbit

 _"_ _Sparky! I made your favorite! Cricket soup noodles with strips of chicken and vat-protein!"_

 _The heavenly scent of the wholesome lunar dish filled Sparky's nostrils, and he raced into the apartment from his balcony. Above him, a glorious, quarter-mile-wide arch of grey rock, illuminated by giant arc lamps, formed a literal vault of the heavens._

 _Sparky misjudged his step, sprang too high, and hit the ceiling. The coming-of-age of the first generation of children born and raised in lunar gravity had led to a huge change in construction practices, and ceilings were now being built a meter or two higher._

 _His mamoola hurriedly rushed over to him. "Sparky! Are you okay? Sparky?"_

* * *

"Sparky, are you okay?"

Sparky opened his eyes, and Paloma's face stared back at him. He wasn't dead. They'd won. He must have passed out after the engagement, both from the stress of the engagement and the high-gee burn.

Oh, and Paloma was Security, so he needed to watch his mouth around her.

"Ahh… I'm fine. Where are we?"

"That burn took us way up the gravity well. We're on a hyperbolic trajectory away from Earth. We should have enough delta-vee to get back to L1. Betty's on the horn with Chongqing now."

"Did we get the radios back up?"

"Yep. Once the jamming went down, Link 16 went back online. We've got data and voice."

Sparky looked down. He wasn't wearing his vac helmet!

"Relax, we got the command module patched and pressurized. Hab's still holed, though, Noah's patching the bedroom. Once it's done, we'll use it as an airlock to patch the utility deck and galley. Until then, access is via spacewalk."

"Another incentive for Noah to work quickly, then."

"He's nearly done already."

They both laughed, happy to be alive. Paloma sighed. Betty stopped talking, took off her headphones, and turned towards them.

"Sparky, you're up! Excellent! Chongqing wants us at Lagrange 5. Their table guy says we should have enough propellant to make it. Check her trajectory."

Noah tapped on the heat-shield hatch, and his voice came in over the cockpit radio. "Bedroom's pressurized. I'm coming up."

Betty opened the heat-shield hatch, and Noah tumbled up onto the flight deck.

Betty was exuberant. "All hands, brace for acceleration! Sparky, get us to L5 on a nice, easy burn. No crash couches. 0.05g. Palo-Lieutenant Ramirez, watch that reactor." Betty had stopped smiling.

A few minutes later, with the Tieshan Gongzhu underway, Sparky finally turned towards the Major.

"So, what's going on at Lagrange 5?"

"A labor strike, a dead saboteur, and a propellant depot."

Sparky tilted his head. "I thought L-5 had redirected asteroids and an over-budget refinery."

Betty chucked. "L-5 has that, too."

Noah was skeptical. "Uhh… Betty? We have no laser, no telescopes, no missiles, and a degraded antenna. Why exactly does Chongqing want us out there?"

Betty smiled. "We've got drones, mines, antimissiles and an autocannon. We don't have propellant and we aren't combat-capable. SAC needs every fighting ship it has for war ops, and we're not in fighting trim. Therefore, my command is perfect for a mission of some importance but with minimal combat duties."

Paloma raised an eyebrow. "I presume they want us to show the flag, sweep for mines, and drop off a basic surveillance network?"

"Exactly, Lieutenant Ramirez. Have you been reading my orders?"

Paloma slammed her fists into her armrests, causing her to rise upward.

"Guys! Do you really think I spend all my time reading your mail, spying on you and filling out loyalty cards? You all know what Security does! They told you in Officer Cadet School! I deal with severe security breaches and maintain morale, not suppress dissent!"

Paloma drew her mouth into a thin line, and looked at her three crewmates in turn. "I'm still your friend, crewmate, and engineer."

Paloma looked at Betty. "You're still my commanding officer, Major Barrett. You're a talented and dedicated commander, and I'd follow you anywhere."

Sparky spoke up. "Paloma, we don't think you spy on us. It's just that it's hard to be fully comfortable about somebody who keeps lots of secrets. Plus, you undermined the chief's authority back there. It was warranted, it was legal. But the chief's the chief, and for a moment there it looked like you were trying to take out the chief!"

Under normal circumstances, Paloma would have chuckled at the repetitive diction. Instead, she just sighed, and dragged herself back down into her chair.

Betty put her arm on Paloma's shoulder. "Paloma's right. We may not be combat effective, but we need to be mission-capable. And that means keeping up morale and maintaining trust. Paloma prevented me from accidentally disobeying orders, and helped avert a nuclear war in space. I'd like us to go into the history books one day, but not alongside Paul Tibbets and the _Enola Gay_. Or Gavrilo Princip."

Betty nudged herself downward to bring her head level with Paloma's, and looked her straight in the eyes.

"Thanks, Paloma. You really saved us back there."

Paloma nodded. That last part was a half-truth, and the girls knew it.

Noah raised his hand. "Question. Why did USS think our ship needed a security officer?"

Paloma lightened. "Oh, that's not classified. Remember last year's long deployment to that Near-Earth Asteroid mine? USS likes to put a security officer on ships running trans-lunar missions. Small crews in confined spaces get stir crazy very easily on multi-year deployments, and a Security officer on board can limit the wackiness."

The fact that the ship had nukes and could launch them without codes (a relic of SAC interceptor aircraft operating protocols*) was left unsaid.

Paloma looked pointedly at Sparky and Noah, and then turned to Betty, a sheepish expression on her face.

"Plus, when light-speed lag reaches twenty minutes and consultations with Chongqing aren't available, an extra circuit-breaker is handy to have. After that deployment, I liked this ship so much I decided to stay onboard."

Noah continued. "And the secrecy?"

Paloma shrugged. "How would you have liked worrying about Security for a whole year? You had enough on your plate dealing with Sparky!"

Noah nodded, apparently satisfied with Paloma's explanation.

Betty smiled, and patted Paloma on the back. This would do to keep up appearances for the boys.

"Okay, people. Back to the briefing! Earlier today, USS found a saboteur on L-5 with a stockpile of anti-ship mines. They were Brilliant Pebble-type devices, more than enough to punch a hole in a volatiles tanker and keep the station closed to shipping. So far, the station's Marines have been unable to coax the mines out of hiding with the station tugs. Chongqing wants us to sweep L-5 for mines with what little equipment we have left, and set up a surveillance network to watch for future sabotage attempts. The miners have been a little demoralized by the whole affair, so a quick response will make the Air Force look good. Documents are coming up Link 16. But first…"

Betty looked around the command module.

"Back to repairs! Paloma, Noah – you're on exterior duty. Paloma, I want a detailed assessment of damage to ship systems and a list of repairs we can perform while underway. Noah, help. Sparky, you and I will get the galley and exercise decks patched and pressurized. Then I'll finally get to take a proper shower."

* * *

 _*Author's note: In the 1950s and 60s, the real-world SAC (of the USAF) armed its interceptors with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles to blow up evil Soviet bombers. While authorization would have been needed to arm the weapons on the ground, aircraft in flight probably would not have required codes to launch their nuclear munitions. They would have required permission, but this would not deterred crazy people or scared pilots out of contact with ground control._

 _The JGAF's SAC probably did something similar, and haphazardly adopted the same protocols for long-duration space patrol craft. These protocols were written for one-man interceptors, and thus had no provision for a two-man rule. Also note that the Tieshan Gongzhu's four "tactical" anti-ship nuclear lances can each deliver three Hiroshima bombs worth of kaboom onto a terrestrial or space target._


	16. Trigger

17th October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Lissajous Orbit

Lagrange 5

"The place looks like the world's biggest game of tic tac toe! Look, the guy with the Os hasn't used all his pieces!"

"Sparky, don't belittle the installation."

Despite her protests, Betty couldn't help but agree with Sparky. The eight large mirrors and the offset pizza-box of the installation did create the appearance of a square checkerboard, and the meatball-shaped rocks placed behind the mirrors (and on long booms away from the square) did give the impression of a one-sided game of tic tac toe.

The crew of the Tieshan Gongzhu continued to examine the blurry, 400-pixel images taken by the secondary telescope on the remaining command module CRT. The one directly above Betty's station had been lost – the hull patches, resin seeping from their edges, a grim reminder of the Tieshan Gongzhu's brush with destruction.

While the small secondary telescope was nowhere near as powerful as the primary, Noah and Paloma's repairs had restored it to full functionality. With a working telescope, the Tieshan Gongzhu now had long-range IRST (infrared search and tracking), a working spectrometer, lidar, and tightbeam.

Betty's crew had outperformed all pre-war (well, pre-skirmish) expectations regarding underway repairs of military spacecraft. While the ship had no spare 5-m mirror for the main laser, and the intricate, sealed free-electron laser was probably a total loss, many of the ship's systems had proven reparable. Modules had been swapped out, systems rerouted around damaged components, and a few temporary "software patches" – typed out on-ship by Paloma and Noah – had been used to get X-5 working again with two-thirds as many processors.

This bode well for the manned future many envisaged for the Space Navy (ahem, SACSOG), and would provide ammunition against those who believed that the future of space warfare lay in unmanned drone ships.

Betty smiled at the thought. Perhaps her crew would make it into the history books after all.

* * *

Mines, missiles, and antimissiles are all very similar systems. At the heart of all three is a maneuverable kinetic kill vehicle (KKV), a small missile which can boost itself to several kilometers per second and maneuver to target a moving spacecraft or ICBM.

An antimissile is usually just a KKV, or one with even less propellant than usual. A missile usually attaches the KKV, or a cluster of them, to a high-performance boost motor, increasing the velocity, destructive power, and survivability (against point-defenses) of the missile.

In a mine, the KKV is encased in a "lifejacket", which provides it with power and protection, enabling the KKV to drift through space for weeks to years until a target presents itself. At that point, the KKV can burst from its lifejacket to engage. SAC's primary space mine was the Brilliant Pebbles II system, which used the trunk-sized Gecko KKV with the appearance of a hot dog with four buns.

De-mining a region of space was a complex operation. Well, it was thought to be a complex operation, since space demining operations had, up to this point, been purely hypothetical. Deming cluttered asteroids, not free space, without a laser, was even more complex.

Betty and her crew had been forced to improvise, putting together their own operations plan from multiple field manuals.

* * *

 _*Author's note: The reader is encouraged to type "Brilliant Pebbles" into Google images to visualize the real-world proposed weapons system._

 _"_ _Okay. So what's first?"_

 _Noah, floating high above the "floor", threw the demining manual onto the galley table, and Betty caught it._

 _"_ _First, we follow protocol. Full-spectrum ECM and jamming. If the Soviets see us coming with a de-mining operation, they'll just tell their mines to shut down until we're gone. Alternatively, they might turn their mines on to blow us out of the sky. Or their mines might be networked for swarm attacks. With jamming, we take all of that off the table."_

* * *

Noah, clad in his spacesuit as per combat protocols, checked the range. "Betty, we're closing to fifteen thousand klicks. Do you want me to put the music on?" His hand went to the big red ECM button.

"Hold your horses, Noah. Paloma, do we have a secure link to the Marines on-station?"

"Yes, ma'am. Handshake established. Passwords good. Calling them now."

The Marine on the other end picked up.

"This is Warrant Officer Gretchen Wittmann, Joint Government Marines. We have you on-screen, Tieshan Gongzhu."

"Warrant Officer Wittmann, this is Major Betty Barrett, Tieshan Gongzhu. We'll be with you in approximately six hours, and will be beginning ECM operations in thirty minutes. Did you receive our burst?"

"We did. We're executing as we speak. Wittmann out."

* * *

Isabella got on the EVA radio link. "Okay, people! Terminate your EVAs and come inside for instructions!"

* * *

 _Paloma rubbed her chin. "We might want to keep their shuttle outside. Have it burn before and after we turn on the ECM. That'll keep the Soviets from turning on the mines before we start jamming them."_

 _Sparky pulled a face. "If it doesn't, that shuttle'll be toast. Those mines will go for it like moths to a flame."_

 _Betty nodded. "Shuttles are cheap, warships are expensive. Let's hope the mines aren't smart enough to tell the difference between a shuttle and a cargo ship."_

* * *

Betty highlighted a fly-speck on the corner of the installation. "Good. They kept the shuttle outside as bait".

"Betty, was that conversation really necessary? It was long enough to make that burst pretty much worthless."

"Noah, it's common courtesy to tell the people you're defending that you're going to be jamming them, especially when there might be people on EVAs who need radios to communicate. Hit the music on my mark."

She turned to Paloma. "Paloma, depressurize the ship."

* * *

 _Noah flipped through his manual. "X-5 should be able to scan for and jam enemy attempts to break through our ECM. If we release drones to triangulate, we can even direct fire onto mines or control drones that squawk."_

 _Betty shook her head. "Drones go out after we burn into L-5. Or else they'll just zoom past us and leave Earth orbit."_

 _Sparky crossed his arms. "We don't have a laser! How are we supposed to de-mine with an autocannon?"_

 _"_ _From an uncomfortably close distance. Plus, we can always press-gang the Marines into helping."_

* * *

"Okay, we gave them their thirty minutes. They should have had enough time to run for the nearest airlock. Noah, let's get this party started! Music on!"

Noah slapped the ECM button, and a directional torrent of energy overwhelmed virtually every unhardened radio and microwave link within a kilometer of the station with megawatts of white noise and rock music.

Beside him, in a hodgepodge of spare processors and temporary fixes, X-5 hummed away, silently scanning the station for attempts to break through the jamming with spread-spectrum signals or higher output powers. If X-5 found any, it had standing instructions to jam them immediately.

Humans simply couldn't hit the ECM button quickly enough.

* * *

Lieutenant Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, clad in a digital-camouflage hardsuit, inspected her assembled task force: Eight Marines clad in hardsuits, two USS agents in skinsuits, and a probable Special Activities agent – also in a skinsuit.

"Okay, ladies! Your suit radios have been set to bypass the jamming. If nobody mixed up the codebooks, we should be good. Begin testing."

"Ginger, do you copy?"

"I copy, El-tee."

"Adyson?"

"I'm good."

Everybody else sounded off their mikes, and Gretchen (in Main Ops) followed suit.

"Okay. Board OMVs!" Pairs of space-suited figures began strapping into the disc-shaped orbital maneuvering vehicles. Small rocket-powered discs with seats and controls, and a long robotic arm attached, the OMVs were nimble, fast, and fragile. Designed to move cargo pods, satellites, and heavy equipment around the station exterior, the OMVs also doubled as inspection platforms or as mobile mounts for robot repairmen.

Isabella once again cursed her lack of a dedicated port security team as she strapped herself onto the flat surface of the OMV. Finding and removing munitions was a job for teleoperated robots, not real people. But with the station's cheap single-channel teleoperations link jammed by friendly ECM, and no way to splice the high-bandwidth robots onto a secure network…

…things had to be done the old-fashioned way.

* * *

 _"_ _And then?"_

 _Paloma flipped to page four. "After we burn into L-5, we start mine hunting. We hit the entire volume of space with lidar and radar as per free-space mine hunting protocol. If anything unusual pops up, it gets hit with an autocannon round or a Marine bullet."_

 _Sparky looked skeptical. "And just how are we supposed to find mines among the rocks?"_

 _Noah smiled triumphantly. "We map the surface of every rock in L-5 with lidar. If the odd bump or filled-in-crater on the surface of the asteroid doesn't give a mine away, the spectrometer will pick up whatever substance the mine's made of. Unless they buried the thing under a layer of dirt, a mine is going to be covered in aluminium alloy, plastic, or tarpaulin, and that is going to stick out like a sore thumb from the surrounding dirt on the spectrometer."_

* * *

"Seven hundred kilometers. Commence burn?"

After they burned, they would have nearly no propellant left in the tanks for large maneuvers. If they failed to load propellant from L-5, they would be stuck here. Betty nodded. "Commence burn, Sparky. Take us down."

Betty was pressed into her seat as the ship killed velocity.

Noah turned a switch. "Beginning lidar scan & jam. Radars on."

The ship's telescope came to life, flickering spots of lights across the asteroids and modules of L-5. A composite scan of the asteroids began to take shape on Betty's CRT.

The burn concluded. Betty hit a switch, and two non-stealthy probes fell away from the Tieshan Gongzhu.

* * *

"This is Kim, we're in position."

Kim and Ron's OMV was floating three hundred meters off Rock 6, mounted on the end of a 400-m long boom from the main assemblage of mirrors. High above her, the squat, cylindrical shuttle burned its rocket engine, trying desperately to seduce enemy mines.

Sitting side-by-side with her was Ron, who was fiddling with the settings on his grenade launcher. Between the duo was a large robotic arm, which Ron controlled from his couch.

She took aim at the rock through the scope of her stubby rocket-bullet grenade launcher. Recoilless and robust, the grenade launcher was a deadly accurate point-and-shoot weapon in freefall.

"This is Sweetwater. We're in position."

Atop the girdles of the pizza-box, Shego and a pair of Marines pressed their eyes to rocket-bullet anti-materiel rifles.

"Center team in position."

* * *

 _Betty frowned. "How do we tell the Marines where to shoot?"_

 _Paloma nodded. "Easy. We turn up the dial on the tightbeam lidar. It's got a couple of kilowatts. The dot it projects at a few hundred klicks will only be a few meters across. The spot will be as bright as a patch of sunlit ground, and highly visible in the shade of the mirrors."_

 _Sparky raised his eyebrows. "We might also trigger something."_

 _"_ _That's our job, Sparky."_

* * *

"Found one! Weird box, Rock 6, made of aluminium! Killed! Two more on rock six. Huh, quartz window. Illuminating… Killed. Killed."

"Good work, Paloma. Noah?"

"Spectrum's clear. Not a peep out of anything."

"Rock 6, you're up!"

Ron took aim at the large blue dot on the rock, and fired a 20mm grenade into the dot. The dot exploded into a shower of particles in an unusually large secondary explosion.

* * *

 _Betty bit a piece off her no-crumb chocolate bar. "What happens if the mines execute a fail-safe and go after the nearest target?"_

 _Noah swallowed a floating droplet of water. "We let the shuttle get killed, and prepare to be shot at."_

 _Sparky, his mouth full of no-crumb marshmallow biscuit, spoke next. "How do we counter?"A steady stream of half-chewed fragments spewed from his mouth, floating around the room._

 _Noah shrugged. "The same way people countered missiles before lightweight, high-power free-electron lasers. Decoys, autocannon, and ECM. I guess it's on me."_

 _Paloma frowned. "That's it! You three are cleaning the air filters at the end of this watch!"_

* * *

"We've got a squawker! Jammed!"

"Vampire, vampire! Three missiles, coming in hot! Impact sixty seconds!"

"Jamming missiles!"

Noah adjusted the secondary laser, and a flashing bright light filled the IR seekers of all three missiles. One missile, distracted, maneuvered wildly, expending all its fuel in a crazed fit.

"One hundred klicks!"

Another missile veered off, followed soon after by the third.

"All gone. Good countermeasures, Noah."

"Piecemeal attacks are a lot easier to handle than swarms."

* * *

Ron tore his eyes away from the developing space battle, and turned towards Kim – looking quite chic in her EYESAFE anti-laser goggles, just barely visible behind her hemispherical helmet visor.

"Woah! Did you see that, Kim?"

"Those mines are pretty impressive in the boost phase. Went up like fireworks! And you said that shooting mines would be boring."

"Rock 6, you're still up!"

Kim took aim at another blue dot, and opened fire.

"I'm not taking that back yet. How'd you like doing this for the next three hours?"

"Excellent work. The top of Rock 6 is clear! Await further instructions for the bottom."

* * *

Noah pulled himself away from the ECM station, and turned towards his commanding officer.

"Betty, I think we should move up the timetable for sensor net deployment. It would be nice to have sensors as close to the rocks as possible."

Paloma, eyes still glued to the lidar, nodded. "I concur, Major. Half of rocks 2, 5 and 6 are clear. We can drop off probes atop them for camouflage and protection."

Betty agreed. Against the warm background of the rock, and "below the horizon" of any mines, the drones would be relatively safe. "We're out of non-stealthies. Stealth probes 4, 5, and 6 are on their way."

Using stealth probes as mobile sensors was wasteful, expensive overkill, but it was better than having no sensors at all.

Below the Tieshan Gongzhu, three angular, oddly-shaped, freezing-cold, pitch-black probes descended onto the rock below, transitioning from radioisotope (i.e. nuclear battery/RTG) to solar power as they went.

"Huh. If we don't use active sensors, the RTGs will do for power. We can keep even keep 'em in shadow."

* * *

 _One hour later:_

Unseen by the snipers below and the sensors above, two space-suited figures floated towards an onyx triangular prism. One figure pressed a button on his suit to take pictures, while the other gingerly extended a small, cylindrical wand towards the stealth probe, his eyes never leaving the meter the wand was tethered to.

The meter ticked wildly. The man's eyes went wide with fear and dread. He extended it once more towards the monolith. The meter ticked far beyond what was considered normal.

The man, a grim look of determination on his rugged caucasian features, waved for his partner to leave. They had a job to do.

* * *

 _This author apologizes for the reduced frequency of updates. Due to real-life activities, the tempo of operations will remain at ~2 updates per week for the foreseeable future._


	17. Incident

17th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

X-5 listened, and thought.

X-5 listened to the vast torrent of data coming in through the ship sensors and subsystem processors. Beyond the faint microwave hum of the cosmos itself were other sources of noise – mostly electrical equipment, which could be found in abundance around X-5's sensors.

Then, of course, there were the reflected microwave signals from the Tieshan Gongzhu's millimeter-wave radars and the jamming from those same multi-function radars. The Westinghouse phased-array-radar computer automatically told X-5 how to filter those out.

X-5 wouldn't have known what to do with the radar signals anyway.

What were left were emissions from contacts. Some were probably friendly, like the ones broadcasting on the unjammed bands that shifted according to secret prearranged protocols.

X-5 monitored those anyway. So far, eight locations had broadcast on those bands. He couldn't understand what they were saying, but if an extra cluster popped out of nowhere, it might indicate that "non-friendlies" had stolen a codebook and were using it to communicate. That would warrant a flag on the operator's screen.

Detecting encrypted unfriendly transmissions was tough work. Unfriendly transmitters were wily. They broadcast on many different bands at once, and changed bands many times a second. X-5, however, was wilier. He could not just detect those transmissions, but also guess at the content of unfriendly transmissions based on duration and signal patterns.

And under his current rules of engagement, anything unfriendly was hostile and would be jammed instantly. The operator would double-check to confirm X-5's decision.

A hostile signal popped up on rock 5. A fail-safe trigger, designed to set off all mines at once if the minefield was under attack? Or a spotter?

X-5 jammed it in microseconds, before it finished broadcasting. It matched the pattern of a trigger, but it was longer than usual. X-5 ran through his databases to find a match. He found one, and flagged it for the operator.

"Soviet atomic demolition munition trigger."

If X-5 had been a person, he would have been very pleased with himself. As it stood, X-5 was a piece of software, and merely continued to listen, and think.

* * *

"What the heck?! Betty, someone tried to set off a nuke! Jammed!"

"Did X-5 hear a fast radio burst again?"

Noah rolled his eyes at the jab at his profession. Fast radio bursts were (probably natural) astrophysical radio signals of unknown origin, and they played havoc with the X-5 system – the predecessors of which had been designed initially as astronomy aids.

Noah skimmed through the data. "No, this looks absolutely nothing like a fast radio burst! Might have just been a fail-safe, though…"

Betty's helmet speakers squealed.

Another flag went up on Noah's CRT. "We just got jammed!"

"You think?"

Paloma, who had turned the lidar to the origin of the purported signal, let her jaw drop, and hurriedly set her lidar to dazzle mode. "Guys… I've got pale blurs scrambling from a hab on Rock 2. Infantry assault?"

Betty turned to her CRT. "We've got an infantry assault! Paloma, get that tightbeam on the facility telescope! They're under attack!"

Two hundred klicks away, a rocket grenade sailed through the vacuum, hit the facility tightbeam array, and detonated.

Noah slammed his palm onto the ECM button, and Paloma began yelling. "Vampire, vampire, vampire! We're under attack! Thirty contacts! Thirty seconds! Missiles, not mines!"

Noah worked the computer-aimed lidar as fast as he could with one hand, trying desperately to confuse the inbound missiles. Some peeled off. With his other hand, Noah slammed down on the button marked "DECOY". The suitability of the decoy configuration he had chosen hours prior would determine their survival. He was wedged uncomfortably against his armrest as Sparky burned thruster propellant.

Betty let loose her remaining antimissiles.

Outside the ship, the autocannon spun around, letting loose a steady stream of decoys. It was quickly joined by a pair of decoy dispensers. Its decoy-deploying sequence complete, the autocannon loaded mesh rounds, and turned towards the station. It began firing.

Missiles peeled off at an agonizingly slow pace.

Eight missiles detonated at once as they collided with antimissiles.

They continued to come.

"Ten seconds!"

An additional missile peeled off.

"Impact in five… four… three…"

Sparky burned the thrusters again. Terminal maneuvers were critical if the autocannon was to work.

Kilometers away, missiles lost guidance and were knocked off course as delicate infra-red sensor heads slammed into fine wire mesh rounds at eight kilometers per second.

"Two… One…"

Betty blinked. Sparky's voice came in through her helmet speakers.

"We're alive!"

* * *

Shego, clad in her skintight spacesuit, took aim at the pale blue dot with her rocket-grenade-firing anti-materiel rifle.

Corporal Millie Sanchez had different ideas, and the dot promptly exploded into a shower of dust and shrapnel.

"Woo Hoo! Beat you to it again, spook!"

Shego grated her teeth, and turned towards the figure in the grey-and-white digicam hardsuit, ready to gun down the Marine for her insolence. Shego thought better of the idea, took a deep breath, and watched carefully for the reappearance of the dot. It reappeared on another point, and Shego blasted the highlighted point into dust.

"How do you like that, huh Mari…"

A shrill squeal cut her off. Shego, acting on instinct, bolted for cover. Three rounds hit where she had been a second earlier.

Millie fumbled with her helmet radio, and promptly took a burst of fire to the torso. Air hissed from the breached suit, bringing with it a mist of fine red droplets that coated the white machinery in a fine mist, clearly visible under the sodium floodlights that lit the shadowed face of the facility.

Corporal Katie Harris dove for cover, but was promptly cut down by three figures clad in the blue-helmeted beige hardsuits of the Soviet Airborne Troops (VDV).

Shego knew better. Given the great difficulty with which they had somehow been smuggled on-station, she was likely facing nothing other than a Spetsnaz unit – Soviet special purpose troops.

"Spetsnaz" was actually a catch-all term for special warfare units in general. Army, navy, and KGB units each had their own "Spetsnaz", and the Soviets would have described Shego, the two USS agents, and perhaps the Marines as "Spetsnaz". While far from an army of supermen, Spetsnaz were the cream of the Soviet military, and were well-trained, well-equipped, and highly motivated.

The secrecy under which the Spetsnaz operated meant they often wore VDV and Soviet Naval Infantry uniforms.

Shego took aim at the descending hostiles with her tri-barreled machine-pistol, and cut down two beige-suited figures with rocket bullets. The third returned fire, and tried to use his thruster pack to overfly Shego's position. Shego ducked, pushed off her cover, and cut the man down in a spray of floating red globules.

Three more beige-suited figures appeared around the large rock crusher Center Team had occupied. Shego dashed into the maw of the rock crusher, squeezed through a narrow gap in the base, and reappeared on the other side, allowing her to shoot two Spetsnaz in the back.

Chaos reigned around her. Unseen spetsnaz fired grenades and rounds into machinery and habitats seemingly at random, even as they swarmed into the installation. Water vapor, oxygen and hydrogen gushed from ruptured spherical balloon tanks, which deformed under enemy fire once emptied of their valuable contents. Air hissed from breached pressurized modules.

Shego thanked her lucky stars that the station had been on Puncture Alert throughout the shrapnel-producing de-mining operation. The crew would have donned skinsuits and kept helmets close at hand.

The cheap emergency skinsuits would provide scant protection from shrapnel or bullets.

Shego noted that particular attention had been devoted to destroying machinery connecting the installation to the rocks. Cables, hoses, and bracing trusses that had once extended in orderly arrays were shredded, holed, or mangled beyond recognition or repair.

Staying within the maze of girders atop the "pizza-box", concealed by pipes filled with hot coolant and lightly-insulated high-voltage electrical wiring, Shego crept her way to the nearest airlock…

…just in time to see a fireteam of Spetsnaz disappear behind the airlock doors.

She was debating whether or not to use another airlock when a noiseless explosion lit up her position, and Shego dove for the deck as hot fluid began spewing from ruptured coolant pipes.

* * *

Ron, startled by the squeal in his helmet, leaned hard on the joystick, causing the OMV to spin wildly.

Kim grabbed the controls, and the OMV stopped – just in time for a large hole to appear near the edge of the disk-shaped OMV.

If Ron had not jiggled the OMV, it would probably have hit the fuel tanks dead center.

Kim gunned the throttle, and was pressed into her seat as the OMV zoomed forward. Ron fiddled with his helmet, and Kim glimpsed his screaming face as Kim intentionally jiggled the thrusters – and as he jerked forward while Kim pulled the throttle into reverse. Ron's mouth soundlessly opened once more as Kim unbuckled his seat belt as she ploughed the (reverse thrusting) OMV into a girder, and failed to close as they were thrown clear of the vehicle and into the thin solar panels that fronted the pizza-box.

One anti-materiel round finally found its mark, and the OMV spun off into space, its oxygen tank ruptured.

Kim fired a burst at the backside of the solar panel carpet, braced against a girder, ripped a hole in the flimsy material, shoved Ron through, and clambered for her life in the dazzling sunshine. Behind her, a burst of fire, drawn by the small sunbeam she had momentarily created, shredded the solar panel.

Ron simply stared, slack-jawed, at the smooth ocean of blue silicon under a perpetual midday sun – nearly the opposite of the dark, cluttered industrial landscape they had just departed. Kim pressed her helmet against his.

"Ron, focus. Rip holes in the solar panel above a truss. We need to get out of here, and I don't want them to know where we went."

Ron did as he was told, ripping holes in a blue panel wedged between a pair of shiny service rails. The flat white metal shell of a module appeared beneath. A corridor-sized space in between marked the hollow core of the truss.

He felt Kim push him in, and they were swallowed by darkness.

* * *

Isabella grunted as she crawled along the surface of the silicaceous asteroid, a less-valuable rock that had been moved into L-5 just to certify silicaceous asteroids for redirection.

Her OMV had been hit by multiple anti-materiel rifle rounds, but she had been able to ditch the out-of-control vehicle. Her partner, Holly Jenkins, had been less fortunate, and was now tumbling away on an unidentifiable vector, rescue transponder jammed.

Isabella wondered whether the Air Force would spare rescue vehicles for her Marines.

She plopped herself down in a small crater on her tiny world, and inserted another clip into her 20mm grenade launcher. The flight time would be an issue, but in the airless, weightless environment of L-5, where rounds always travelled in perfectly straight lines (maybe with the exception of defective rocket bullets)…

…anyone could be a sniper.

A flash caused Isabella to slam her eyes shut. When she opened them again, she was greeted by the surreal sight of an upside-down snowstorm. Thousands of tonnes of snow spewed forth from ruptured space shuttle external tanks that had been wrapped around a module near the center of the installation. The vast cloud of ice crystals shimmered in the brilliant sunlight like a curtain of fireworks as it spread beyond the shadow of the installation, and dissipated as the ice slowly sublimated under the harsh glare of the sun. A gaping maw appeared in the side of the module encircled by the breached tanks, and through it, Isabella recognized the projector screen and computerized workstations of Main Ops.

It was the most beautiful and most horrible thing Isabella had ever seen. Main Ops was gone, and perhaps two Marines with it.

Four beige-clad figures floated into the hole, giving the ragged edges a wide berth despite their hardsuits. Isabella took aim at the quartet and opened fire.


	18. Out of Control

The balding JGAF Colonel enters stage left, and begins to talk in his trademark monotone.

 _Waging war requires more than just men and materiel. It requires the ability to employ men and materiel in a coordinated manner._

 _In other words, it requires command, control, and communications, or C3._

 _The importance of C3 should not be underestimated. Without good C3, an army is no more than a well-armed mob, incapable of waging war. Units fail to provide mutual support. Supplies cannot be requested. Orders are not executed._

 _Since its inception, command, control, and communications have been at the heart of the Space Operations Group. Among the first missions of the Space Operations Group were the establishment of a nuclear command post in high earth orbit, and maintenance of sensitive communications platforms._

 _Command and control of space forces is divided into the strategic and operational realms._

 _Strategic command and control of the Pacific's space forces is closely entwined with control of the Joint Government's strategic nuclear forces. It is exercised from a survivable ground-based bunkers, airborne command posts, and space-based command posts._

 _It is of interest to note that the Strategic Air Command's Nuclear Pulse Battleships each contain scaled-down nuclear command posts. These command posts posses the authority to prosecute a global thermonuclear war in the event that contact is lost with the Civilizational Command Authority._

 _Operational command and control of the Pacific's space forces is exercised from ground control centers. At present, the only active such center is located in Strategic Air Command's underground headquarters complex in Chongqing, Sichuan Province. The construction of new command posts off-world is under consideration._

 _Communications with spacecraft is achieved through a mix of space-based relays and ground stations, connected to SAC command posts through secure fiber-optic and coaxial cable communications lines. Hardened and networked, these links are designed to enable the Strategic Air Command to maintain control of its forces throughout a global thermonuclear war._

 _Excerpt, "Video Introduction to the SAC Space Operations Group", produced by the Joint Government Air Force in 1971_

* * *

17th October 1984

Space Operations Control Room

SAC Underground Complex

JGAF Chongqing

Technical Sergeant Mike Harris rubbed his eyes. Around him, sitting in a semicircle, were four other mission control personnel, each staring at their CRTs with determined boredom. More such semicircles filled the room beyond. On the far wall, three giant screens showed the movement of friendly, hostile, and neutral spacecraft in cis-lunar space.

A transmission came in over the high-priority channel. He scanned the identity of the sender. JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, OF-41. Huh. They had bypassed their own mission control team in the room down the hall. Well, there wasn't a major space battle on, so the primary control center was free.

Harris accepted the call.

"Chongqing, this is Tieshan Gongzhu. L-5 is under attack by a hostile infantry force. Repeat, we have a hostile infantry assault on L-5."

Harris checked the big screen. The only things he could see in L-5 were a pair of relay stations, a radio telescope, and a smattering of observation platforms. There were no hostile spacecraft to be found.

"Say again, Tieshan Gongzhu. L-5 is under attack? We see no enemy spacecraft in your vicinity…"

The woman on the other end continued to speak, courtesy of the three-second delay imposed by light and the electronics.

"We are proceeding to L-5 to provide fire support. The hostile infantry emerged from abandoned prospector habs…"

The woman finally heard Harris's (now redundant) query, and stopped. "Repeat, the enemy force emerged from abandoned prospector habs. Enemy jammer present in same. Friendly infantry exposed and jammed. Check our telemetry to verify."

Harris raised his hand. "Sir, we have a situation at L-5! Soviet infantry assault, unknown origin. A frigate's moving in to provide fire support."

A SAC major-general walked over. "What, did they spacewalk a hundred thousand klicks?" The grey-haired Han Chinese, wearing spectacles too large for his face, sighed, and yelled to an adjacent station. "Get me pictures of L-5!"

The technician quickly complied, and on the big screen, the images of the RVSN spacecraft regiment massed near the Powersat Platform disappeared, to be replaced with an image of what appeared to be a tic-tac-toe board.

A young airman ran into the room. "Sir, the Tieshan Gongzhu's demining operation has gone south…"

A large explosion flashed across one of the squares, and the whole room jumped. The operator quickly zoomed in to the central part of the installation. Vast quantities of volatiles leaked from ruptured tanks, and smaller explosions told a story of a firefight in progress.

The young airman (apparently attached to the Tieshan Gongzhu's mission control team) walked over to the console, and put the Tieshan Gongzhu's mission control team - a small, five-man, one-cubicle operation – on speaker. "Guys, you're on. They've already got the battle on-screen."

"Uhh… well, sir, the Tieshan Gongzhu is being jammed, just survived a forty-missile salvo without lasers, and is proceeding on its last reserves of propellant to L5."

"Get me a Marine liaison!"

"We don't have one, sir. Only Crazy Mountain - SPACECOM has a joint operations setup. Tieshan Gongzhu was on a deep space deployment, not Lunar Ops, so their C&C's here."

The general cursed under his breath. They would really have to review operational procedures after this war was over.

He weighed his options. If Tieshan Gongzhu was destroyed upon closing with L-5, JOINTGOV would lose their last connection to L-5. But if it stayed put, it would be unable to influence events on-station one way or the other. He wondered how well-fortified the station was, and decided that the commander of the frigate probably knew better than he did.

"Tell them to proceed according to their best judgment."

Another technician rose from her chair. "Sir, we've got CINCSAC, the ADGOV and the COTGOV on line 1. They want to know what's happening at L5."

The major-general's eyes nearly popped out of his head. If the COTGOV – the Coordinator of the Joint Government Ronald Reagan – was on the line, things had gone very south indeed.

He picked up the phone. "Mr. Coordinator, sir? The hotline to Moscow? Now? It was a regular mine hunting operation. Oh, uh… from what I gather, sir, there was a saboteur on-board the L-5 mining station with anti-ship mines, and she mined the installation. L-5's asteroids might supply water and metals for our forces and space industry during a long war, sir. No, I know of no such contingency, sir."

The general, flustered, flipped through an operations manual. "I'll put you through to the frigate's mission control team."

He handed the phone to the airman. "Uhhh… Mr. Coordinator, sir. Well… the ship was performing non-standard mine hunting procedures – well, nobody's ever de-mined asteroids without a laser before, and it's not in the operations manual. We jammed enemy communications, scanned the rocks, and directed Marines to shoot at possible mines, sir. Mines can talk to each other, so we jam them. Yes, sir, we are still in contact with them."

"Hmmm… Soviet troops came out of nowhere and attacked the frigate, the Marines, and the installation. They appear to be destroying the installation. The frigate's en route to provide fire support."

The airman looked around the room, and was met by a sea of expectant stares. "Uhhh… the Coordinator says to hold the phone."

Another voice rang out. "The Soviet destroyer regiment at the Powersat Platform is burning hard! It looks like they're headed to L-5!"

The major-general, finally in his comfort zone, began issuing orders. "Get the JGSS Leviathan, JGSS Yumian Gongzhu, JGSS Lancelot and JGSS Percival on their tail!" He rubbed his chin. "Keep them well beyond engagement range! Ten thousand, no, fifteen thousand klicks!"

A colonel spoke up. "Sir, do you think it's wise to send half the task force chasing after the Reds? Mass is pretty important in a space battle, and if we deploy our forces piecemeal…"

The major-general nodded. "Add destroyers JGSS Ywain and JGSS Wasp to the chase. Designate Task Force 10!"

The Colonel gasped. "Sir, we're leaving the Juggernaut, an old frigate, and an old destroyer to defend the Powersat Platform? What if the Soviets make a dash for it while the fleet's away?"

"Well… we pray like hell that they don't. But I will not miss an opportunity to destroy two entire Strategic Rocket Forces Regiments far from critical facilities."

* * *

Shego crept along the ceiling of the darkened corridor, lit only by the occasional orange emergency light.

While technically there was no "up" or "down" in freefall, and personnel usually just floated down the middle of the corridors, the corridors had been painted and lit to give a clear visual sense of "up" and "down" for crew sanity, and most humans adhered to the artificial convention.

The station's composite and metal walls had held up well against shrapnel from the ongoing firefight and space sanitization operation. The low-pressure, oxygen rich atmosphere typical of "Puncture Alert" had mostly stayed inside the practically bulletproof hull.

Main Ops, of course, had been the exception.

Dr. Lipsky had wanted to set up the control systems for Project CYCLOPEAN in Main Ops, but Shego had reminded him that it would have given the (admittedly compromised) project away to everyone on the station.

After seeing the enemy blow a gaping hole in Main Ops, she was thrilled that she'd held her ground even while Lipsky whined like a little girl.

Her orders for dealing with the current Charlie Foxtrot were reasonably simple. Rescue and hide Lipsky, or kill him. The secrets in the scientist's head could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands.

Shego tried the comm once more. Not a peep. Enemy jamming was still up.

She arrived at a six-point three-dimensional crossroads where three corridors (hers running "vertically") crossed at right angles to each other. Gingerly, she extended her head into the station main artery… and came face-to-face with a blue-helmeted Spetsnaz, who, from her perspective, was standing on the wall.

The downside of rocket bullets is that they require a short distance – usually a meter or two – to accelerate to deadly speeds, making them suboptimal for very close quarters. The Spetsnaz soldier, clad in a hardsuit impervious to punches and kicks, knew he had the advantage in hand-to-hand combat, and lunged upward to overpower Shego.

He had not counted on Shego's SinoDef Slap-o-Death™ Slap Grenade. A coin-sized (but much thicker) shaped charge capable of penetrating light armor, the Slap Grenade had a reinforced back that allowed it to be detonated while in the open palm of a user.

Her thumb on the primer, Shego slapped the Spetsnaz soldier hard on the side of his blue helmet. A lance of molten tin jabbed through the unfortunate soldier's head, and gas hissed from his cracked helmet visor. The noise was loud even through her helmet, and Shego gritted her teeth as her ears rang.

Grabbing a rail to brace herself, Shego kicked the body back down into the corridor. Using it as cover, she fired two bursts into the soldier's stunned partner, whose lifeless body continued to float serenely towards her. Firing wildly down the corridor, she barreled her way down the main artery, ducking into it just in time to see return fire hit the corner.

Voices in Russian screamed for reinforcements and medical aid.

She raced into the brig - and was nearly cut in half by a burst of fire. A small cluster of figures crouched behind makeshift barricades on the floor, ceiling, and wall, clad mostly in orange emergency skinsuits. Shego turned to the sole figure in a military skinsuit, crouched upside-down behind a barricade on the ceiling.

Door-to-door fighting in freefall was confusing as heck.

"Why the heck are you here, Sergeant Hirano? And why isn't this barricade in the corridor?"

Sergeant Ginger Hirano's gaze never left the door, and her voice, tinny on her external speaker, was firm.

"Miss, my job was to secure this room. Since I have not received orders to the contrary, and since this room contains sensitive equipment and fragile civilians, I will continue to secure this room until those Red bastards walk all over my cold, lifeless body." Shego looked blankly at the Sergeant, and Hirano tilted her head. "I can see the corridor just fine from here."

"Did you ever consider that those fragile civilians would get killed in the crossfire, Sergeant Hirano?"

"Shego! You're alive!" Dr. Lipsky, clad in an orange suit, rushed forward to give Shego a hug. Shego extended her arm, stopping him in his tracks.

"Woah. Hold it there, doc. Did you wipe our gear?"

"Of course I did, Shego. I wiped Possible's gear, too. I couldn't figure out the purge codes, so I burned it."

Drew pointed at a charred, half-melted blob of metal and plastic.

"How the heck did you do that? Most of the stuff here is fireproof!"

"Shego, you'd be amazed at what you can burn with metal shavings, firearms and an oxygen canister."

Lipsky held up a half-empty spare bottle for his emergency suit.

"And the acrid fumes?"

"Well, we are all wearing spacesuits."

Ginger's assault rifle barked thrice, a poorly-timed grenade exploded in the hallway, and the emergency door began to swing shut as air hissed through small cracks in the corridor, stopping when someone hit the override. Shego sprang forward, shoved Lipsky to the floor, and took up position behind the barricades.

* * *

Ron followed Kim down the quasi-corridor formed by the open trusses of the installation, the warm solar array just beneath their feet. Devoid of an open channel on which he could blabber (Ron's usual means of coping with stress), Ron focused on the sound of his own breathing instead.

As Kim scouted ahead, Ron scanned their rear for unwanted attention, trying his best to keep Kim in the corner of one eye while doing so. Getting separated in the dimly-lit underside of the installation would simply not do.

Kim motioned for Ron to duck behind a large heat exchanger, and the two touched helmets.

"So, what's the plan? Grab a nuke from the storeroom?"

"Nah, that wouldn't work. The codes are earthside, and our suit radios can't break through the jamming. We're going to blow up that."

Kim pointed at a cluster of bulbous inflatable cuboids, each the size of a small aircraft hangar. Ron's eyes went wide.

"Kim, that's life support! We can't blow up life support! The station's emergency stores won't last two months! And who knows when this'll be over?"

Kim nodded tersely. The determination on her face made Ron's blood run cold.

"The Soviets will either have to run food past the Air Force's blockade, surrender, or start getting rid of hostages to stretch stocks – giving the Executive Office an excuse to blow this place right out of the sky. Either way, we win. Plus, I'm hoping that blowing up life support will shock the workers into fighting back."

"What?!"

"Do you remember the first thing Xiang Yu did when his army crossed the Yellow River to battle the Qin?"

Ron closed his eyes, and cursed his younger self for sleeping through Pacific History.

"He… sank all his ships and broke all the woks?"

Kim closed her eyes, and her voice fell soft.

"Xiang Yu gave his men two choices: victory or death. His men fought for their lives, and secured victory. If we force the workers to pick, they'll pick victory too."

"Or die trying! We can't be considering this!"

"It's deniable, simple, and gets the job done - no matter how badly this turns out."

Ron desperately tried to the find a flaw in Kim's logic. "Can't the Air Force do it later?"

Kim shook her head. "They'll get eviscerated by the press, and the workers will probably be unsympathetic."

Ron's eyes searched the dark industrial landscape, and his head spun left and right. "What about the JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu? They could help!"

"Ron, they might be dead! We might be our side's last shot!"

"We don't know that, Kim!"

Yelling into Kim's fury-ridden face felt weird.

"That's the point! We don't know! We need to pick the option with the least risk, and right now, the safest option is killing life support!"

Kim put her hand on Ron's shoulder, and stared him straight in the eyes. "It's the winning move, Ron. I'll do it myself if I have to, but I would really, really like you around to watch my back."

Ron closed his eyes, and exhaled. "Okay, KP. Let's get this over with."

Kim turned away, but Ron grabbed her arm, and leaned forward to touch helmets. "I don't think you're doing the right thing, KP. But no matter what you do, I'll always have your back."

Kim turned towards him to answer, and forced him to the deck. "DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!"

Rocket bullets bounced off the trusses around them, and a blue-helmeted soldier emerged from cover to shoot. Ron fired his sidearm in the rough direction of the enemy. Kim, grenade launcher in hand, scrambled to another piece of cover. An explosion blew the Soviet infantryman's hideout to pieces. Ron could have sworn Kim had stayed under cover the whole time.

Fire from another truss forced both Kim and Ron to scoot around their respective pieces of cover. They were being outflanked. Kim turned towards the life support tents – only to find a large pipe blocking her line of sight. She looked straight at Ron.

Ron nodded, and Kim tossed him the grenade launcher. He fumbled the catch, but an awkward juggle later, the heavy semi-automatic rocket grenade launcher was safely in his hands. Kim returned fire ineffectually at their well-armored attackers, and Ron turned towards the life support tent.

It was all in the manual: two grenades to shred the inflated Kevlar envelope, one to kill the labeled oxygen tank (and set everything momentarily aflame), and one for each cylindrical pressure vessel. Aim for the places where the pipes enter the pressure vessels, and set grenade fuses to armor-defeating.

Ron took aim at the white tent.

A car-sized cylinder with arms, thrusters, and three small, square windows leapt into his field of vision. The work pod zoomed over to Kim, overflew her position, and struck an unseen enemy with a sofa-sized mechanical arm. Another work pod overflew Ron, heading in the opposite direction. Kim took the hint, and pushed off a truss, soaring through the vacuum to land on the back of the work pod. She clambered over it, and fired at an enemy Ron couldn't see.

A third work pod maneuvered over Ron's position, thrusters giving off hot puffs of carbon dioxide and excess methane. Ron shrugged, and hopped on the pod. In the distance, Kim's work pod flashed once, causing Kim to abandon the craft, which continued to drift forward. Thrusters burned, and the two surviving work pods dove beneath the life-support tent, Kim in tow.

A small group of workers, clad in a mix of emergency softsuits and semi-rigid suits, carefully approached the group. Stragglers.

Ron poked his head over the edge of the work pod, and stared through the window.

Ron tilted his head. "Ed? What are you doing here? What did you say?"

Ed, clad in an orange emergency suit, continued speaking, gesticulated animatedly, and performed an air guitar in the tight confines of his (apparently airless) pod. Unable to hear a thing through the vacuum, unversed in spacer sign language, and noticing the holes in Ed's pod, Ron smiled, nodded, and gave Ed a thumbs-up.

Kim hopped onto Ed's pod, and placed her helmet against Ron's. Ron gave her a hug. Kim grumbled.

"Well, there goes the plan."

"We still have the grenades."

"Ron, the whole point of the plan was to make it look like the Reds blew up life support. It doesn't work as well with witnesses we can't get rid of."

"Well… now we have a team of big scary robots on our side."

"They aren't bulletproof, we can't tell them what to do, and our team is down to two pods."

An orange-clad worker hugged them both, and pressed his helmet to theirs. "Stoppable, my man, am I glad to see you!"

Ron's eyes went wide. "Felix?"

"Yeah, it's me. Never trained for EVA ops, but it's okay as long as you don't look around!"

"What the heck are you doing out here?"

"The Soviet troopers tried to corral everyone into the spin section. I guess they figure it'll be easy to control everyone from the spin hubs. Ed and his boys decided to make a break for it, and I kinda followed them outside. Snipers got a few of us, but we're mostly alive."

Kim nodded. "How many hostiles?"

"Uhhh… I didn't really have time to count. I saw six, seven... maybe ten? When's the Air Force going to be here? We only have air and water for a day or two, but that's enough time for the Air Force to come upwell, right?"

Ron shook her head. "We've lost contact with the Air Force ship on-station. The Soviets are jamming our comms. For all we knew, the Air Force might be fighting a system-wide space war by now!" Ron's breathing quickened.

Kim jabbed Ron in the ribs, and straightened. "Mr. Renton, I'm not going to say that everything's going to be okay. It probably won't be. However, I will say that we'll be ready for anything that comes our way. You can count on us."

Kim noticed Ron regain his composure, and continued. "Panic won't get us anywhere. We need to stay calm and work the problem. Is there anyone in your group who does EVA work? We need the locations of air recharge stations; those'll give us spare filters, water and air. Next: food. Is any of the stuff stored in vacuum?"

Felix nodded with newfound energy. "I'll go ask around." The engineer pushed himself off a beam and floated over to a nearby huddle of space-suited figures.

Kim bit her lip. How much of her own little speech did she believe?

The analyst within Kim noted that her measured statements were accurate, but that the tone was excessively optimistic. The romantic within her forcefully reminded her that She Could Do Anything, that elan, skill, and determination could win the day against superior force. The analyst partially concurred, but was sent into a tizzy as she tried to decide whether her somewhat justified conviction would be her salvation or downfall.

Ron turned to Kim. "Thanks for keeping it together for both of us, KP. I can always count on you."

Kim snapped out of it, and shrugged. "Ron, it was no big. It's what we've always done. We'll get through this."

Their helmets began beeping insistently. "Radiation alert! Get to cover!"

* * *

Isabella fumed in her tiny crater.

She'd had a good run, killing the fireteam in Main Ops, and one or two random hostiles. Heck, she'd even kept the Spetsnaz snipers on the rocks next door suppressed for a while. Probably saved the crazy workers who had taken off in their work pods the moment they saw Spetsnaz burst through their door.

None of that had mattered, because nobody else had known that the enemy's snipers were suppressed.

Of course, with at least one Spetsnaz sniper watching her rock like a hawk, she was in no position to influence the outcome of the firefight – she hesitated to call the platoon-sized action a "battle" – even if she had perfect communications. Spetsnaz thermal sniper-scopes meant she would be dead the moment her warm, 300-kelvin head poked above the 250-kelvin edge of the cold rock.

Her helmet's radiation alarm began beeping insistently. Noting the distinct absence of a nuclear flash, she shrugged, and killed the alarm.

Even if there was a scrap of cover around – and the prospector hab was on the exposed side of the rock – she would probably be dead soon enough anyway.

The miniaturized reverse osmosis unit in Isabella's suit would produce enough water from her urine for her to survive for a week or two, but she only had enough O2 (and fuel-cell methane) for a couple of days. She had no food for her chow-lock.

Isabella chuckled grimly at the thought, and shook her head. This was the fate she had imagined for Adrena Lynn.

-e fate she had imagined for Adrena Lynn.


	19. Atomic Betty

17th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

In nuclear fission reactions, heavy nuclei of fissionable elements are deformed and split by impacts with neutrons. Neutrons and smaller nuclei are formed, and energy is released from nuclear bonds. This energy is emitted in the form of gamma rays and kinetic energy – the kinetic energy of the smaller nuclei and neutrons, which fly off at respectable percentages of the speed of light.

In a nuclear reactor, the smaller nuclei and gamma rays dash their energies against their neighbors, and add their energy to the material of the reactor instead of flying off into space, heating the reactor.

The neutrons are much more slippery customers, and are only stopped by the walls of water, steel, and concrete that surround most terrestrial reactors, which heat up in the process. The penetrating power of neutrons (and certain other forms of radiation) also allows them to enter our bodies to kill, injure, and/or increase our risk of cancer, depending on the duration and intensity of exposure.

To save weight, spacecraft reactors are unshielded (except in the direction of the rest of the spacecraft), and as such are glowing beacons of death. This is fine because space is huge and almost entirely empty.

Tieshan Gongzhu's twenty-gigawatt nuclear rocket engine was no exception. During a long burn, the gigawatts of wasted neutron radiation that shone from the "hot" reactor could kill unprotected individuals within a hundred klicks.

Thankfully, the Tieshan Gongzhu only had a tonne or so of propellant left, and this burn lasted no more than a few seconds.

The radiation dose received by space-suited personnel on the surface of the ARC complex, a mere twenty klicks away, still exceeded the annual dose limits for members of the general public. It did not, however, exceed the dose limits for astronauts, which were a hundred times higher.

It also triggered every radiation alarm on the surface of the installation.

* * *

Betty felt the brief feeling of weight subside, and was jostled in her seat as thrusters made adjustments to their vector. As the thrusters cut out, Sparky's voice came in over her helmet.

"We're on vector, chief!"

Paloma looked up from her instruments. "As calculated, we singed 'em, but they'll definitely live. Major, we have our target on lidar. Handing off to you."

Betty checked her own screen, where a computerized gunsight was plastered over a fuzzy image of a small habitat on one of the installation's rocks. "Okay. Paloma, keep your eyes on our hits. This burst is going to be marginal."

Paloma replied in the affirmative, and Betty briefly squeezed the trigger.

Twenty seconds ticked by. A flurry of puffs appeared over the surface of the rock. A few puffs were around the habitat, but the can remained unscathed. Paloma's voice, triumphant, came in.

"Good shot, Betty. Follow through!"

Betty smiled, and held on to the trigger for nearly three seconds.

Three gaping holes appeared in the side of the habitat, and Noah cheered as the enemy jamming subsided.

Betty got on the comm. "Surviving friendly forces, this is JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, come in. Surviving friendly forces, this is JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, come in. Surviving…"

A high-pitched feminine voice came in over the radio.

"Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro. Quite the entrance you made back there. Scared the poop out of everyone."

"It's a good thing we're all wearing diapers, then."

"Couldn't agree more, Tieshan Gongzhu. I'm holed up on rock 6, and enemy snipers on the three rocks on top of the main installation have me suppressed. Please rain hell on them."

Beside her commander, Paloma frowned. Nobody on the station was a trained forward air controller, they had no air support authentication procedures in place, and they couldn't tell if their comms were being spoofed. Unless…

She took over the comm.

"Lieutenant, what was the score of last week's Pac-Cup semifinal?"

"Nicaragua won 4-2, Tieshan Gongzhu. Now can you give me some fire support?"

Betty twisted her lips thoughtfully. If Tieshan Gongzhu had been an aircraft, providing air support without a trained forward observer would have been a nightmare.

However, Tieshan Gongzhu was a spacecraft. The angular velocity between Tieshan Gongzhu and the station was negligible (i.e. the station wasn't zooming past her cockpit window), the battlefield was compact, and, now that the clouds of snow had sublimated, visibility was perfect. She could see half the battlefield through the secondary telescope.

Betty smiled. This could actually work.

"Affirmative, Lieutenant. Stand by."

* * *

17th October 1984

Soviet Continuity-of-Government Installation

Undisclosed Location

The war was going badly.

The Warsaw Pact, preempting the impending capitalist invasion uncovered by geopolitical computer algorithms, had pushed the Collective Defense Organization (CDO) back more than a hundred kilometers. Soviet spearheads were now at the gates of Prague. Every last one of the offending aerospace defense lasers had been razed from the hilltops of the Czech Republic and Austria. At sea, the Soviet Navy, with the aid of Long Range Aviation, had sent hundreds of tanks, trucks, and helicopters to the bottom of the Atlantic, humiliating the powerful Joint Government Navy.

Unfortunately, as the pessimists had predicted, CDO had refused to come to the negotiating table, and the Joint Government had consolidated its position on Europe's flanks.

Worst of all, the offensive in Central Europe was slowing. Soviet spearheads were being counter-attacked at every turn by JOINTGOV forces, which briefly struck deep into the Soviet rear before continuing their brisk retreat. The dozens of medium-sized enemy offensives were extremely confusing, and Soviet high command was being inundated with requests for advice and reinforcements. Deeper in the Soviet rear, the capitalist air forces were wreaking havoc on Soviet lines of supply and reinforcement.

The General Staff's carefully crafted operational plans were, if not yet in tatters, under severe strain. Already, the Soviet follow-on forces, meant to maintain the momentum of the offensive, had been forced to commit themselves piecemeal. The timetable for the deployment of the third strategic echelon had been delayed a week.

The Soviet general sighed, and rubbed her temples. The Joint Government Army's new doctrine was performing as intended.

And now this. A half-hour ago, a communiqué from a Spetsnaz detachment monitoring the capitalists' orbiting rocks of death told of the unthinkable: Final preparations for a JOINTGOV first strike. Asteroid-moving nuclear bombs had been emplaced near the rocks, ready to send Belgium-destroying rocks down the gravity well at a moment's notice – doubtlessly alongside a hail of nuclear warheads.

The capitalists had tried to hide their nuclear devices in sheaths of cold, radar-absorbent paint, but these failed to stop the atomic radiation from the devices, which had been readily detected by the Spetsnaz. The brave men and women of the Special Purpose Battalions of the Soviet Airborne Troops, who had hidden in deplorable conditions behind enemy lines for weeks, had valiantly attacked without heed to casualties.

Across the table from her, the spineless half of the Soviet Politburo was insulting their sacrifice by believing the pack of lies being sprouted by the JOINTGOV Coordinator, Reagan. Oh, they were convincing lies, and, coming from the mouth of a trained actor, mesmerizing in their sincerity.

The Politburo was coming to a consensus. And it wasn't to preempt.

She stood. "Comrades! The Joint Government knows that we will lose a nuclear war! They have a larger rocket force, more powerful lasers, and more space mines! Their missile defenses are superior! They have every incentive to start a nuclear war, which will destroy us but merely devastate them! We must gain the initiative in the imminent nuclear conflict, and launch first!"

An elderly man in a suit and tie shook his head. "Those sound like reasons not to start a nuclear war."

Another grey-haired man – the head of the KGB - nodded in agreement. "Our analysts agree with the Pacifican version of events. The enemy project was stated to employ buried thermonuclear warheads to propel the asteroids away from the station prior to de-orbit. No warheads were emplaced beneath the surfaces of the asteroids."

"They could have changed the sequence and chosen to sacrifice their station!"

The KGB chairman turned to the Strategic Rocket Forces representative.

"General… you are to tell your men – spetsnaz, fleet, and all - to stand down, and revert to your original posture."

The Strategic Rocket Forces (RSVN) General nodded, and reached for a phone.

The KGB chairman next turned towards her. "General, you are to cease deployment of the Third Strategic Echelon in the southwestern theater of operations. We will hold on to Yugoslav territory as a bargaining chip, but we will no longer continue our advance."

The general was aghast. "Tens of thousands of my men… died for a bargaining chip?"

The KGB chairman exhaled. "The timetables are in a bad way. We do not see any hope of a swift and decisive conventional victory the General Staff promised. A long conventional war – and that is what the capitalists wish for – favors the capitalists, which have a gargantuan industrial base to mobilize. A nuclear war to destroy the capitalist industrial base favors the capitalists."

The general rose, and slammed her fists to the table. "What about a limited nuclear war! Burn Western Europe to a cinder, and leave the Pacific intact! The Asian capitalists will not have the stomach to risk their homelands for Europe!"

The chairman bit his lip. "All of Europe, from Ireland to Hungary, will go up in flames."

The general, her jaw agape, returned to her seat. Her voice softened. "We will lose Eastern Europe. The next war will be fought on Soviet soil, just like the Nazi invasion."

The KGB chairman closed his eyes. "If we start a limited nuclear war, we will _certainly_ lose all of Eastern Europe and/or the ensuing general nuclear war. If we admit defeat, we _may_ lose Eastern Europe, and perhaps in parts only. Our army will survive to crush uprisings instigated by capitalist propaganda. Socialism will survive to rise again."

His voice faltered at the last sentence.

The RSVN general put down the phone. "We have lost communications with the Spetsnaz at L-5. We believe the enemy may have destroyed their laser communications unit."

This was a disaster. The enemy would certainly not agree to cease jamming their communications - the risk of subterfuge was simply too great.

The KGB chairman frowned. "There is nothing we can do for them, then. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must inform our enemies of our decision."

* * *

17th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

"Sergeant Hirano, please confirm that hostile forces are located in intersection between brig corridor and main corridor."

"Confirm, Tieshan Gongzhu."

"Please confirm request for fire along entirety of main corridor."

"Confirm, Tieshan Gongzhu. Sweep the whole corridor from the fore airlock to Main Ops. We don't know what's on the other side."

"Firing explosive rounds. Watch out for strays and debris. Impact ten seconds."

"Get down!"

Ginger ducked behind her barricade. Ahead of her, a dozen gashes appeared in the "ceiling", and bits of debris blasted scars out of the walls behind her.

Shego's voice came in over the comm. "One stray hit the brig! Two casualties! One guy got blown out!"

Ginger swore. For all the precautions they had taken to minimize the harm from friendly fire…

She poked a spare helmet above her barricade, and was rewarded with a burst of fire.

"Repeat fire, Tieshan Gongzhu!"

Another hailstorm of high-explosive ammunition ripped holes in the corridors.

She poked the helmet up again, and gingerly advanced through the corridor, two rifle-toting volunteers behind her.

She looked left, then right. All clear – except for the mangled remains of four Soviet hardsuits (and their occupants). The remaining Spetsnaz had probably been blown into space.

"Good shots, Tieshan Gongzhu."

* * *

"Couldn't have done it without you, Sergeant."

Betty got off the comm. While the fire support directions were crude and un-standardized, they had so far been adequate to clear half the station of Soviet personnel.

Isabella came in over the radio. "Sergeant Hirano, you heard Possible. Once you have cleared your half of the station, proceed to the spin hub. Maximize use of fire support. Put pressure on the spin hub corridor!"

Betty shook her head. "Sergeant Hirano, we have ten seconds of ammunition remaining. Please make 'em count."

Kim came in over the radio. "…are proceeding to Spin Hub. Contact, contact, contact!"

"...en route. Nearly there!"

"KP, fire in the hole! Nailed one!"

Betty cursed the single channel available. Still, like the fire support directions, it was better than nothing.

* * *

"KP, fire in the hole! Nailed one!"

Kim popped back "up" into the sunlight. A few dozen meters ahead, an ocean of blue silicon abruptly ended in an infinite black cliff. Ahead of the dropoff, however, were a dozen holes from which enemy soldiers emerged like moles in a whack-a-mole arcade game. A blue helmet emerged, and Kim ducked back down.

On the reverse side of the solar panel, another, "upside-down" firefight was playing out, this time in the dim glow of scanty floodlights.

"Isabella, hurry up! We need suppression on the panel!"

"Okay, I'm set up… one hostile down! They're under, they're under!"

Kim jumped into the sunlight, pushed off the lip of her hole, and zoomed towards the nearest enemy mouse hole.

"Got another! Watch out!"

Kim caught the lip of the enemy mousehole and jumped back through the solar panel, doing a backflip to emerge behind a startled enemy soldier. She slapped the enemy soldier on the side of his blue helmet, and a loud bang reverberated through her suit. Nobody else heard a thing in the vacuum.

Kim spotted a pair of Spetsnaz crouched behind a long pipe (actually a pressurized corridor) that defined their line, and shot them both in the back.

Enemy resistance on the spin hub exterior crumbled quickly soon after.

* * *

Kim moved over to the spinning section of SPIN HUB A. Memories of holding onto Lynn's corpse while floating through a star-studded, sunlit sky swum back to her, and she shook her head to refocus.

Behind her, Ron and three volunteers awkwardly floated above the spinning cylinder beneath them. All five of them cradled carbines, acquired from the Spetsnaz who had died defending the spin hub's exterior, trapped between a sniper, a spacecraft autocannon, and Kim.

She attached the sole tether line to an anchor point. Two others followed her lead. "Above" her, a fifteen-storey fabric tube stretched into the distance, terminating at an apartment-block-sized hab module. Beyond the hab, a starfield slowly moved across the sky as Kim rotated with the hub. She motioned for a group huddle, and four helmets touched.

"People, once we push off, we'll start accelerating toward the hab. It'll feel creepy. Hold on tight, and don't look up."

Ron wrapped his arms around Kim. "Don't look down into the infinite drop. Got it."

"Okay." Kim raised her fingers. "Three. Two. One."

Kim pumped her fist, Ron jumped as hard as he could, and began to panic as he felt himself "fall" upwards.

"Don't look up, don't look up, don't look up…"

Ron looked up.

"KIMMMM!"

He turned towards Kim, who met his gaze. "Ron, look at me. Don't look up."

The habitat module came up to meet them, and Kim engaged the tether brake. They stopped in front of an emergency airlock.


	20. Deliberation

17th October 1984

JOINTGOV Continuity of Government Installation

Undisclosed Location

Seated around a semicircular table, the assembled members of the Executive Council paid rapt attention to the bulky TV monitor. The dimly lit conference room was uncarpeted, and the cheap laminated wood paneling was a far cry from the plush offices the various Administrators were accustomed to, but the installation was secure. With a major war on, that was all that mattered.

On the monitor, the grainy image of General Sally Forth, Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC), shook her head.

"Mr. Coordinator, sir, we cannot permit the Soviets to transmit any data to their personnel at L-5, even instructions to surrender. The risk of subterfuge is too great. SAC will not endorse this course of action."

The Coordinator sighed.

"Sally… General Forth, there are three hundred innocent people being held captive on that station. Those Spetsnaz are tough troops. I'm worried what they might do during their heroic last stand if they don't receive orders to surrender."

"Sir, during the demining operation, Tieshan Gongzhu detected a trigger for a backpack nuke – and jammed it. If we shut off the jamming, the Soviets will have the ability to detonate that nuke or launch anti-ship mines – reversing the gains the Marines have achieved."

The Foreign Affairs Administrator looked skeptical.

"The Soviets stopped their spaceships. They have said sorry for the incident, and they are demanding less. They want to stop this space war."

"Administrator Hu, every single one of those actions is reversible. They can turn their ships back towards L5 or the Powersat Platform in an eyeblink."

The Defense Administrator raised her hand.

"Could they detonate those nukes with a single channel?"

"We don't know, sir. If the detonator link was configured solely for low-probability of intercept radio… probably not. But if the signal was encrypted like a detonation code, it is probable that the Tieshan Gongzhu's X-5 computer would be able to detect it in time."

The Defense Administrator continued.

"Would they be able to tell their forces to surrender on a single channel?"

Appreciative nods bobbed across the room.

"When jammed, many of our tactical radios are programmed to search for open channels. If their radios are similar – we don't know that - one channel will be sufficient. The main problem should be authentication on their end."

Murmurs of assent could be heard around the table. The Coordinator nodded.

"We'll give them one channel, then." He turned back to the general. "Do we let them request a different one?"

"No, sir. Give them the international band. We'll stop jamming that band when they say yes."

* * *

17th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

"JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Chongqing. Please prepare a protocol to cease jamming the international band, over."

Noah, busy triangulating occasional bursts of radio energy from desperate Spetsnaz attempts to activate mines, blanched.

"Say again, Chongqing? You want us to stop jamming the international band? Over?"

The tone of the communications officer was urgent.

"That's a negative, Tieshan Gongzhu. We want you to prepare to cease jamming one single channel. When ordered, you are to stop jamming the international band. Exercise extreme caution. All communications on the international band are to be monitored by X-5, and jamming must be able to recommence instantaneously upon detection of malicious signals. Please repeat instructions, over."

Noah finished scribbling down the instructions.

"Repeating instructions: Prepare to cease jamming international band when orders given. Prepare to monitor free band for malicious signals and recommence jamming as necessary. Confirm?"

"Confirm, Tieshan Gongzhu. Await further orders."

"Uhhh… Chongqing? What is the purpose of this free channel?"

"That information is not available at this present moment. Keep the pressure up on those Spetsnaz, Tieshan Gongzhu."

Noah switched to ship internal comms. "Betty, Chongqing wants us to stand by for orders to stop jamming the international band."

"Why on earth would they want to do that?"

"Beats me."

* * *

The emergency airlock (required by occupational safety regulations) quick-cycled with a bang, and Kim barreled into the (very limited) cafeteria kitchen, ducking behind a large microwave oven. Ron followed, landing behind a large pressure cooker of boiling vegetables with a thump. Kim motioned for the cafeteria lady (apparently still manning her station) to get down. Three armed orange-suited workers took up positions beneath the serving counter.

Upon hearing the deafening bang, the Spetsnaz man standing guard outside the spin habitat's food stocks ran into the kitchen, carbine drawn. Kim gunned him down as he entered the door.

His partner, halfway across the room, was forced to the ground by a hail of fire from the three workers. However, the seasoned soldier calmly returned accurate fire, suppressing the three untrained workers as he made his way to the kitchen.

Ron, thinking quickly, grabbed a plastic jug of water and threw it over the pressure cooker. The resulting cloud of steam gave Kim the opening she needed, even as Ron drew fire by dashing for the door. Kim nimbly backflipped over the top of the oven, spun her body in mid-air, and cut the enemy down before landing beyond the counter.

She sprinted for the "lobby" at the base of the inflatable Kevlar access tube, Ron in tow.

"Ron, watch the bottom. I've got the top."

Kim aimed her rifle up the emergency access ladder, and fired off a burst.

"Ron, back to cover! Go, go, go!"

They ducked back into the cafeteria just as a grenade detonated, spewing plastic pellets across the lobby.

Kim darted across the ruined lobby, catching a glimpse of a rapidly descending semicircular elevator (probably being used as cover by the advancing Spetsnaz) before returning to the cafeteria. Kim nodded, and she and Ron grabbed one of the fixed tablelegs.

"Tieshan Gongzhu, they're in the tube! Open up now!"

* * *

Less than six kilometers away, Betty pulled the trigger on her joystick, and quickly walked the autocannon crosshairs up the image of the non-load-bearing fabric access tube on her screen.

Three heartbeats later, the narrow access tube disintegrated into a flurry of Kevlar confetti.

* * *

Ghastly noises - buzzing, howling, and squealing - filled the room as air, potable water, and black water whooshed out the shredded Kevlar tube, followed by a loud bang as the emergency doors sealed it off.

The room fell silent. Kim stood up. "Nice shooting, Tieshan Gongzhu. You didn't even cut the cables."

* * *

"Actually, I cut at least three. You should be thanking the engineers who put in the extra margin."

Betty moved to target another access tube.

"Tieshan Gongzhu, cease fire immediately! You had orders not to fire on the habitat section!"

"Negative, Chongqing. Our orders were to minimize civilian casualties, not preserve the empty access tubes."

"Negative, Tieshan Gongzhu! Do not open fire on the access tubes! Preserve enemy lines of communication!"

"Sir, if we don't cut those tubes, enemy forces in the habitat modules will reinforce the spin hub when our assault begins! Marines are going to die out there!"

"Hold fire, Tieshan Gongzhu! That's an order!"

Betty smacked her fist into her armrest. "Dagnabit!" She switched to the Marine channel.

"Isabella, Ginger! Command just flat-out ordered us not to shoot out the access tubes! It's going to get hairy down there!"

Isabella's tone was furious. "Come on! Just when… Ginger, when you make contact, try to draw 'em out! Feign a retreat! Tieshan Gongzhu, get a bead on the junction!

Betty turned to shipboard comms, and swept her gaze around the command module. "We won't be shooting out the access tubes. Brass just declared them off-limits."

Sparky cursed in his min chinese dialect. "Bastards sitting in comfy chairs in a bunker…"

Betty glared at Sparky. "Stow it, Lieutenant. I don't like it, but maybe the brass knows something we don't."

Sparky snorted. "It'd better be something good, then."

The Marine channel crackled. "Contact, contact!"

* * *

Ginger ducked behind the lip of the big airtight doorway, which encompassed the width of the entire corridor (roughly that of a pickup truck). Beyond the corridor that led from the doorway lay the entrance to Spin Hub A – and at least one squad of well-motivated, highly-trained Soviet troops.

A few bursts of fire buzzed through the corridor.

She popped her weapon across the threshold, and fired a three-round burst of 5mm caseless back down the corridor.

A Soviet light machine gun opened up, forcing her back behind the doorway. The corridors, intersections, and cramped rooms of the station had been useful for canalizing enemy forces for destruction by space support. However, they also made flanking maneuvers difficult, working in favor of the well-armed Soviet defenders when space support (or airlock-based mobility) was not available.

With the Soviets holed up in the relatively fragile spin hub, off-limits to the supporting frigate's autocannon, this was currently the case.

Opposite Ginger, an orange-suited worker leaned too far out, and her head exploded into a mangled ball of gore. The casualty's body remained roughly upright in microgravity, and the head and arm were hit multiple times in quick succession by enemy fire.

Ginger turned away from the gruesome sight, and directed her head back to the lip of the doorway. She kicked the floor, and made her way to the ceiling, moving across the corridor behind the doorframe. She reappeared just above the bullet-ridden casualty (whose suit read Dolphin Liu, Ginger involuntarily noted), and popped off a string of bursts. This surprised a Spetsnaz machine-gunner, who had been trying his best to avert his gaze from the bloody mess, and he caught a burst to the torso.

Ginger screamed a battle cry (muffled by her helmet) and charged down the corridor, barreling through the air in her hardsuit like a fat seal through water. Four workers, clad in lean orange skinsuits, followed. Shego, remaining behind the doorway, continued laying down suppressive fire from behind cover.

If they could just reach the lip of the spin hub doorway before the enemy recovered…

Four Spetsnaz emerged from cover to open fire.

Ginger shot one in the face, and turned to shoot another.

A dull impact reverberated through her chest. She couldn't breathe. Then a searing pain momentarily ripped through her face, and she felt nothing at all.

One Spetsnaz survived to return to cover.

The exchange stopped. Five mangled, upright cadavers continued their lifeless charge through the blood-spattered corridor, their forward motion carrying them to the enemy courtesy of Newton's First Law. A few hit the lip of the spin hub doorway, and tumbled into the spin hub.

Shego, veteran of a dozen dirty operations, had seen her fair share of the horrors of war. The sight of charging, upright cadavers (unintentionally mutilated by exchanges of fire) still made her want to hurl in her helmet.

A few beige-suited arms reached out to clear the cadavers from the lines of fire. A worker raised his rifle.

Shego forced it back down.

Then she remembered Sergeant Hirano's secure radio.

Shego gulped, poked her rifle up, and fired thirty rounds of caseless ammunition into the Sergeant's lifeless digi-cam hardsuit.

She took extra care to shred her head and torso.


	21. Resolution

17th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

Isabella shifted uncomfortably as she wiped her dirty visor with a piece of charged cloth. Staying close to the grey surface stony asteroid provided good concealment from enemy eyeballs and a braced firing position. The downside was that the rock was cold, uncomfortable. Like the moon and most asteroids, the rock was also covered in sticky, powdery, razor-sharp dust with the consistency and carcinogenicity of pulverized asbestos.

"JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Shego. Sergeant Hirano is KIA, and her suit is in enemy hands. I tried to destroy the radio at range, but I might have missed something. Can you kill her radio from your end?"

"Negative, Shego. We'll just have to watch out."

"I don't think we can win this one, Lieutenant Garcia-Shapiro. We're down to three effectives. With fire support, we can probably keep them holed up in Spin Hub, but reinforcements would be nice."

Isabella closed her eyes, and blinked away tears, which formed small floating droplets inside her helmet. Her vision blurred with adhered tears, interfering with her ability to use the scope of her grenade launcher. The Marine fought the urge to disobey orders and shoot the fragile spin hub, currently housing a diminished number of Spetsnaz troops.

It wasn't worth it. Damage to the spin hubs might send the eight spinning modules, attached to the two spin hubs via connecting tubes and tethers, on a one-way trip into deep space, or dash them against the station's attached rocks. It wasn't worth killing the three hundred of her fellow Pacificans being held captive.

Kim's voice came in over her helmet. "Lieutenant? Do you want us to try the airlock on the other end of the spin hub? An attack from the rear might work…"

If she had been down there, she would have been fine. Adrenaline would have kept her running at a hundred and ten percent. Up here, looking over the battlefield like an impotent god…

…she had too much time to think.

"No, Agent. The situation remains unchanged. The rear airlock is too close to the enemy. They'll rip you to shreds the moment that airlock light turns green, even with an emergency quick-cycle."

"What about the emergency door on the shredded tube?"

"Sounds like the best option we have. Go for it."

"You got it, Isabella."

* * *

"Tether's out of reach. Ron, hold on to my legs. Get someone to hold on to you. Okay, this is scary. Ron, let me out further. My knees will hold."

Betty drummed her fingers on her armrest, powerless to aid the Marines. Chongqing came in on Betty's suit radio.

"Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Chongqing. Cease jamming the international band as previously discussed. Confirm when done, over."

In the corner of her eye, Noah punched a few switches, and his chipper voice rang through the channel. "Affirmative, Chongqing. Jamming has ceased. Starting to monitor, over."

Noah frowned as he translated the Russian. "I've got a Soviet transmission, fully encrypted. There are a few unencrypted words, probably codewords. X-5 hasn't detected anything nasty."

"We have your telemetry, Tieshan Gongzhu."

Noah continued his commentary. "Transmission appears to repeat on a 30-second loop. Nothing's happened yet."

Paloma spoke up. "Cupcake finally got the tether. They're preparing to ascend."

Betty switched to the link with Chongqing. "Chongqing, please be advised, assault team ascending tethers to spin hub, over."

"Instruct them to hold their positions, Tieshan Gongzhu."

"Contact, contact! Enemy forces firing on assault team. One down!"

* * *

A burst of fire ripped through the orange-suited worker on the second tether, whose body hung limply on the end of his swinging, fifty-meter tether.

Kim gritted her teeth as her own tether continued its unstoppable sway away from the habitat module, into the line of fire.

A fast-moving mass crashed into her, and held onto her for dear life. Her tether continued to swing outward, faster than before. She turned up towards the mass. "Ron?! What the heck are you doing!"

"Extra momentum, KP! Gotta throw off their aim!"

Ron didn't mention that his body would make an excellent bullet sponge.

They began the return swing. A burst of fire missed them by meters.

The Spetsnaz above them cursed herself for her stupidity, and shot out the tethers, readily visible outside the open hatch that had once been the origin of the shredded access tube. A hand on her shoulder shook her, and she ceased fire.

The tether broke, and they began to fall. Ron grabbed on to the lip of the emergency airlock, and Kim grabbed on to Ron's legs. The two surviving volunteers dragged them both back to safety.

"Thanks for the rescue, Ron."

Tieshan Gongzhu came in over the comm. "Cease fire, cease fire! Spetsnaz forces on-station have just surrendered! Cease fire immediately, and do not interfere with enemy attempts to physically contact their personnel!"

Kim looked out the doorway. The tethered, swinging cadaver was gone.

* * *

Isabella, in an orange skinsuit without a helmet, stared at the six prisoners of war (POWs), clad in the striped undershirts and blue berets of the Soviet Airborne Troops. Thankfully, the brig's three cells had remained functional despite the fighting, and now housed two prisoners each.

Legal was still wrangling about whether or not capturing the workers for a strategically important facility was a violation of the Geneva Convention, but had ordered Isabella to keep the prisoners safe regardless.

Kim and Ron were still awaiting the repair crew with the replacement access tunnel, and Shego was busy helping JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu finish demining the installation. The Soviets had provided the deactivation codes, but SAC had declined to broadcast them – again, for fear of subterfuge.

Since she had no more Marines to command, the Lieutenant was on guard duty, watching the watchmen to prevent any unfortunate "accidents" from befalling the POWs.

She opened the cell door, and directed the highest-ranking prisoner, a Major, to exit. He sat down under the watchful gaze of an orange-suited worker.

"Major Omarov. Thank you for informing me of the locations of your atomic demolition devices."

The man's English was heavily accented, but otherwise good.

"Thank my government."

"I'd like to ask about my men. I currently only have one confirmed killed in action. Do you have better records?"

"My men fought Marines near the nuclear explosives depot, the spin section, and the main pod. They reported four down. I will not provide you with any information beyond that."

Isabella nodded. Even seemingly innocuous details could give an enemy useful intelligence. "Was it worth it?"

The Spetsnaz major tilted his head. "I will not provide you with that information." His face betrayed his answer.

She couldn't believe everything he said, but it was closure enough. If she wanted, Isabella could probably get her hands on the after-action reports the spooks were sure to write.

A pang of annoyance swept over her. All her Marines – the only Marines in existence with actual experience in close-quarters freefall combat – were dead. Kim and Shego were excellent fighters, but soldiers they were not. Their testimony would be biased towards special warfare or spook work. However marginally, the Marine doctrines and tactics that evolved from their experience would be inferior than if a Marine had survived to testify.

She chided herself for thinking of her men in such impersonal terms.

Tieshan Gongzhu came in over the radio. "Lieutenant, we have completed de-mining the station. We will broadcast the Soviet shutoff codes in five minutes to verify that demining is complete. Please tell everyone to don their helmets."

Isabella straightened, and walked over to the PA.


	22. Aftermath

19th October 1984

ARC Extraction and Refining Facility

Lagrange 5

Paloma floated through the corridors of the station, clad in a softsuit, mask and protective goggles – the latter to protect her eyes from the vast quantities of metal shavings, dirt, and debris that littered the air of the wrecked corridors. With air filters and ventilation systems on the fritz (or destroyed altogether), the irritating particles would remain aloft in the microgravity of the station for weeks.

Another passer-by noticed her Air Force softsuit.

"Woo hoo! Go Air Force! G-O-V! G-O-V!"

"You really saved our butts back there, girl!"

Paloma tried to smile, and forget the fact that they had inadvertently triggered the battle that had taken close to a hundred lives – and badly damaged the station.

Entire sections of the facility would have to be replaced, and the widely dispersed damage to the rest would take months to repair. The bowl-shaped mylar mirrors would forever be less efficient as a result of the gross contamination by ice crystals and shrapnel.

Paloma wondered whether it would be cheaper to write off the station. Probably not immediately – the station was still a vital propellant source, and JGAF engineering teams were being mobilized to keep the station running until it was clear the ceasefire – conditional on a Soviet withdrawal - would hold.

She floated into engineering.

A small knot of people had formed up around a young, blond-haired man in an USS uniform, who was talking animatedly to his newfound fans. Across from him, a little way beyond the small crowd, a red-haired woman in a similar uniform hung her head, her laughs, objections and glares punctuating the man's storytelling.

Paloma checked the progress of basic repairs to the JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu's hab module with the chief engineer. Satisfied that the ship would keep them alive until they got to L1, she turned to leave.

The knot of people had yet to dissipate. Paloma checked her watch. It had been half an hour.

She walked up to the redhead, and listened as the blonde chattered on about panels and modules crumpled under bursts of autocannon fire "like soda cans on a firing range". She turned her head.

"So, you're Kim?"

"Mmm-hmm. You're with Tieshan Gongzhu?"

"Lieutenant Paloma Ramirez, JGAF, at your service."

"Agent Kim Possible, USS. Thanks for pulling us out of the fire."

Paloma nodded. "I heard. Floating corpses and suit punctures sealed with clotted blood. Must have been nasty."

Kim's tone was flippant. "Just your average null-gee close-quarters firefight. No big."

Paloma cocked an eyebrow. "Are you feeling okay?"

Kim shrugged. "Eh. Ron and I do this stuff all the time. So not the drama."

Paloma tried to find a hint of anxiety, of false bravado, in Kim's tone, but failed. "What about your friend Rob?"

Kim glared at Paloma. "His name is Ron. R-O-N."

Paloma smiled apologetically. "So, is Ron as… resilient as you are under fire?"

Kim sighed. "No, but he holds up pretty well. He tries not to take anything seriously, and that helps him stay calm. The real kicker is training and conditioning. We're all trained to reflexively open fire at targets when we're being shot at. Whatever demons might haunt you can do it later."

Paloma nodded. "I know what you mean."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "You were shooting dots on a screen."

"From hundreds of klicks out, yes. And for the most part, we weren't shooting those dots. The computer was. We were just managing the fire control systems. But it was still scary as heck. Floating bullet-ridden corpses probably takes the cake, but my job was still terrifying, and I am thankful for all the repetitive drills they made us do."

Kim crossed her arms. "Convince me."

"Okay. Out there, you infantrymen held rifles in your hands. You could run. You could hide. You could shoot back" Kim cocked her head. "Okay, maybe not by much. But at least you could act. We couldn't. All we could do was follow our training, enter orders into computers, watch them do the shooting, and wait for the results."

"I don't quite follow."

"Space battles can be very Lanchesterian. That is, very mathematical, with minimal room for strategy. Everyone sees everyone, furstest with the mostest wins. That's why computers work so well for them, and that's why people have been yelling at us for spending money to put crews on our ships. And the feeling of helplessness as you look at your screen, knowing the number of incoming _and_ knowing the number of incoming needed to overwhelm your countermeasures is just terrifying."

Kim thought back to the moment on the tether as she slowly swung into the line of fire. "I see. But you won."

"We lucked out. The Soviets build for simplicity and reliability, and the Soviet commander underestimated what damage control could do. The Soviet commander must've thought that our tank punctures were fatal, and didn't want to waste an extra missile on a dead ship. Won't work again."

"Oh."

There was a silence.

Paloma thought back to the altercation with Betty, and exhaled. "Why did you join USS?"

"I wanted to save the world."

Paloma laughed. "I thought USS went after drug lords, corrupt officials, criminal kingpins and other domestic security threats to keep our country safe and stable."

"What's the difference? The Joint Government has what, a third, one half of the world's population?"

"Yeah, I guess. And the "saving" angle?"

"Do you remember what happens when a dynasty falls messily, or when a major rebellion breaks out?"

Paloma nodded.

"A half-century or more of civil war, famine, pestilence and/or invasion by nomadic peoples of the north."

"With a combined body count in the tens of millions. Twice as many people died in the Three Kingdoms War after the Tang collapse than in World War I – two-thirds of the whole population of Tang Dynasty China. The Taiping Rebellion back in 1860 killed thirty million people. Today, that would be the equivalent of a billion casualties. If preventing that isn't saving the world, I don't know what is."

Everyone knew that the root causes of dynastic succession were a lethal mix of decaying governance and overpopulation, and that security responses, at best, bought time for the government to reform.

She then tried to imagine what thirty million deaths looked like. She couldn't.

Kim continued. "A security response is not always optimal. Root causes of discontent need to be addressed. Changes to decaying governments need to be forced through. Attentive, responsive, flexible, and hopefully-self-correcting democratic and free-market systems go a long way in preventing and cushioning instability. But violent revolts are just far too messy, far too dangerous to not keep an eye out for. In a huge country like ours, wars between regional warlords take decades to settle, and the country often takes a century or more to reunify. Orderly and peaceful reforms of government take less time and fewer lives."

The justification did not account for the changes wrought by democratization and the industrial revolution, and made many assumptions. Paloma decided that those were assumptions she could accept, and nodded determinedly.

She looked down, and thoughtfully stroked her chin.

"You know, no matter how hard we try, the state's going to collapse eventually. Some future government will get corrupt and cruel, or some future invader will kick our butts, or maybe we'll run into a new limit to growth that'll bring Malthus back with a vengeance."

Kim chuckled darkly.

"Heck yeah. All states collapse. Nothing lasts forever. States long united must divide, states long divided must reunite. But our job is making sure that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, and leave everything in good order for our descendants. Beyond that, who cares? Plus, someone usually puts the pieces back together again… eventually."

Paloma gave a faint smile.

"Paloma, you know what? Let's just leave the strategizing and anxiety to the brass, and be grateful for the fact that we survived this mess intact enough not to think too deeply about what happened. Do you want to go get a meal? I hear they have lunar chicken."

Paloma nodded with newfound confidence, and they floated off to the cafeteria.

* * *

21st October 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

High Earth Orbit

With all the damage from the multiple engagements, that last burn had been a little scarier than most. Thankfully (and as expected), the reactor had performed to spec, and Tieshan Gongzhu was now well on its way back to Lagrange 1, where more comprehensive repairs could be made to the spacecraft – and its crew more thoroughly debriefed.

Radar and infra-red showed no objects within twenty thousand kilometers, and Soviet forces had stood down from their forward positions across the Earth-Moon system, in accordance with ceasefire requirements.

Paloma turned over the command module to Sparky, and drifted into the galley deck, where Major Barrett was hard at work on the exercise bike. While drug implants and supplement pills had greatly reduced the regimens required, some exercise was still a necessity to prevent excessive loss of muscle and bone in weightlessness.

"Hey, Betty?"

Betty smiled, let her headphones float in mid-air, and nodded. "Yes, Paloma?"

"I just wanted to tell you that… I found a billet on JGSS Colossus. They'll take me the moment I say yes."

Betty sighed. "It's a bigger ship. Larger crew, different work. It'll look good on your service record."

Paloma nodded, but she looked glum. "I know."

Betty cocked her head. "Do you want to go?"

Paloma exhaled. "Well… I actually wanted to spend an extra year on your ship, Betty. Do a few more cis-lunar patrols… you're all good people, and a pleasure to serve with."

Betty was concerned. "Paloma, we'd love to keep you on, but you should really think about putting your career ahead of camaraderie. You've been a First Lieutenant for two years. This is nowhere near a dead-end billet, but experience elsewhere…"

"Relax, Betty. With the way the emergency war budget is spinning out, SACSOG up for expansion. There'll be plenty of billets to fill in a couple of years when new ships start coming online."

Paloma looked at Betty. "You'd like to keep me on? For real?"

Betty nodded energetically. "Paloma, I've given it some thought. You were just doing your job – a job critical for civilizational security. We might be good soldiers, but all those warlords that carve up China every time the central government gets wrecked have to come from somewhere."

Paloma chuckled. "Nah. Mutinies are usually only a problem when the government screws the pooch on governing, and I'm pretty sure the government's chugging along nicely. Of course, from the inside, it's hard to tell when exactly your civilization is in a bad way. Heck, some people always think civilization's on the verge of collapse!"

They both laughed at the irony of the recent nuclear close call. Betty continued.

"But seriously. Paloma, you were right. You've been a good friend to me and a good engineer to the crew for the past thirty months. And that's good enough for me."

Paloma and Betty hugged.

"So, do you still want to stay on?"

"I think I'll stay on for a little bit longer."

* * *

 _Author's note:_

 _Dynastic cycles are a key feature of Chinese History. A dynasty is established by unifying a broken China, grows to a peak, declines, and is destroyed in a messy civil war that leaves China in tattered pieces, which a new dynasty unifies. This has occurred about nine times over the past 2200 years (for the two thousand years before that, China was less unified in general, with the "dynasty" being more of a feudal king weakly lording over lords than a central government)._

 _The dynastic cycles are generally attributed to decay of government over time, with loss of "Confucian morality" (i.e. the Emperor parties too much with his thousands of concubines and blows the budget on swanky palaces) and increasing factionalization, palace intrigue, corruption, and cruelty. These claims are invariably made by the historians of the next dynasty, which has every reason to slander the previous one to strengthen their claim to the country._

 _Malthusian (i.e. overpopulation-related) explanations are also popular. It may be speculated that the average ~300 year lifespan of a dynasty is roughly the time it takes for the population to rebound from the last crash-related die-off to create population pressure once more._

 _While it is certain that the industrial revolution and French Revolution changed the rules of the model significantly, these changes occurred less than three hundred years ago – barely enough time for one dynasty. As Zhou Enlai famously said, it remains too early to tell how they will change the story of mankind._

 _Kim Possible and Paloma Ramirez are agents of the Unified Security Service. Paloma Ramirez is also an officer of the Joint Government Air Force. Their views can be expected to be biased in favor of the government they serve._


	23. Epilogue: The Next Space War

9th November 1984

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu

Low Earth Orbit

Betty wished that the Tieshan Gongzhu had windows. It was an irrational wish, since her telescopes and radar screens gave her a far better picture of the celestial battlefield than her eyeballs would have, and windows would have let in the blinding flashes of nuclear detonations and enemy lasers.

But the curved horizon below was spectacular, and the fuzzy CRT monitors were not doing justice to the magnificent view.

"Attention Task Force 11, this is Chongqing. Drop pods will be entering atmosphere in five minutes. Stand by."

Betty smiled. For the second time in as many months, she and her crew were part of history in the making. In five minutes, the Joint Government Marines would attempt the first ever spaceborne assault. Dozens of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles would descend from Medium Earth Orbit to land behind enemy lines on Falklands Prefecture, Antarctic Administrative Area.

There, they would provide armor support for a concurrent Marine air assault operation – and provide the solution to the age-old-problem of providing airborne forces with heavy equipment.

It was expensive overkill, but the Air Force and Navy had lost a lot of face by being unable to respond to an invasion of JOINTGOV soil (what with a war on in Europe and all). A big, flashy operation was just the ticket to regain it.

Paloma began yelling as hot flashes popped up over the South Atlantic.

"Multiple launches, Argentine Kilos! SAM! SAM! SAM! Forty-six inbound!"

Similar reports echoed through the flotilla.

Despite the best efforts of the Navy, Argentine CARBOX hydrocarbon-fuel-cell submarines were still active, and had just fired off antisatellite (ASAT) surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

The drop pods now hitting the atmosphere consisted of enormous, thirty-meter heat shields affixed to pressurized tents containing air-droppable tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and parachutes. Smaller derivatives of the resupply pods that had been used to seed Mars and the Jovians with supplies and industrial seed kits, the pods were large, unarmored, and minimally maneuverable.

They were big, juicy targets.

JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu was not. Neither were the other escorts of Task Force 11, or Taffy 11.

Chongqing came in. "Tieshan Gongzhu, Galahad, Tristan. Turn lasers earthward. Kill those SAMs."

A pair of SAMs poked their nosecones above the troposphere – the bottom ten klicks of Earth's atmosphere, which contains nearly all of the atmosphere's laser-scattering air.

Betty turned on the laser, and the SAMs detonated twelve kilometers up. A few dozen others tried their luck, but all were destroyed by intense green laser beams.

Paloma yelled out another warning. "Bulldog, bulldog! Friendly Adzes, moving to engage!"

Betty smirked. Once the anti-submarine cruise missiles splashed their homing torpedoes into the water, the enemy subs were as good as dead.

"Taffy 11, please be advised. Debris inbound from thirty by five degrees. Platforms just killed Argentine kill-sat."

Betty cursed. The Air Force was supposed to have swept all Argentine military satellites from the sky weeks ago. Apparently they had missed a spot. Chongqing came in again.

"Hong Haier, Tristan. Phased arrays to thirty by five degrees. Kill debris."

The two bearings were necessary for describing directions in three-dimensional space.

"Taffy 11, Argentine MiG-25s just took off from a civilian site in Patagonia. Probable ASAT throw."

Betty groaned. The Air Force had been running an air campaign from Antarctica to destroy any and all Argentine military installations and equipment. Aircraft had been on top of their list. How had they missed those?

"Tieshan Gongzhu, EW on those MiGs."

That was their cue.

"Noah! Jam 'em!"

Noah turned the phased array away from the Falklands (currently the object of much jamming) and turned it towards the MiG-25s, clearly visible on radar two thousand klicks off. Bereft of ground control, the Foxbats now had to use their own radars. Making the most of his nuclear reactor, Noah jammed those too.

Betty got on the command channel. "Tieshan Gongzhu confirms, Chongqing. They're jammed."

The Foxbats spread out, and Noah was forced to spread his jamming between the enemy aircraft.

The minutes ticked by. The Foxbats, staying well under five kilometers to gain the protection of the atmosphere, began to climb - fast. By now, the drop pods would be glowing as bright as the sun, and the Foxbats could probably make it by visual contact alone.

"All vessels, burn the Foxbats."

Lasers burned away at the Foxbats through hundreds of klicks of thin air. Four survived to launch missiles. All missiles were shot down.

None survived their futile zoom climbs.

Chongqing returned. "Okay, people. Drop pods are on final approach. Thirty seconds to heat shield jettison. All ECM on Falklands."

Betty inhaled sharply. Once they entered the lower troposphere, the Marines would be in Navy and Marine hands. The drop pods would count on navy strike fighters to destroy any SAMs or anti-aircraft artillery that made an entrance, and rely on Marine attack helicopters and air assault troops to ensure that their landing zones were secure.

"Heat shield jettison. Good separation on all pods. Parachute deployment. Good on all vehicles."

There was very little Tieshan Gongzhu, or any of the ships in Taffy 11, could do to provide aid to the Marines so deep in Earth's soupy atmosphere.

"No MANPADs yet."

Betty hoped that all the enemy forces had expended their air defense weapons on the attacking Marine air assault troops, and that all was going according to plan.

"Touchdown in three, two, one… Treads down. Wheels down. Contact made with local battlenet. Not our department, Taffy 11. Stay sharp. We're not out of the woods until we cross Finland."

Paloma anxiously scanned the skies for inbound threats. Low Earth Orbit was a very unhealthy place for expensive warships. Engagement ranges were too short for good countermeasures, engagement velocities were suicidally high – a mine could have a relative velocity of seven or eight klicks per second, and the horizon meant you were blind beyond two thousand klicks, and had to rely on jammable satellites.

"All wheels down. Taffy 11, watch for subs."

Another brace of missiles came up from a Kilo north of the Falklands, but Galahad easily swatted them out of the sky.

"Taffy 11, perigee burn. Let's get out of here."

Sparky gunned it, and the radiation alarm went off as four nuclear rocket motors burned simultaneously on four ships. The burn would take them all the way back to L1.

Now two klicks per second faster, and soaring over the North Atlantic, the crew breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Betty tried to keep her crew on edge. "Watch out, people. We'll be approaching Western Europe in a few minutes. The Soviets might just decide to turn on the war again."

A lot of (mostly unmanned) laserstars and KEW platforms had been lost over Western Europe in the fighting a month ago, and the battle had generated its fair share of horror stories.

Sparky chuckled. "Nah. We're home free. There's no way the Soviets are going to restart a war they just lost!"

Sparky was right, but nobody else felt truly relaxed until the four ships passed over Finland, and their trajectories flattened out as they ascended back into the safe, empty expanses of High Earth Orbit.

* * *

31st June 1985

Applied Scientific™ Research Installation

Cleveland, Ohio Province

Dr. Lipsky walked out of the boardroom with a faint smile on his face, Shego on his tail.

"You really impressed the brass back there, Dr. D. They'll give your team a contract for bomb-pumped x-ray laser research for sure. But do you think the boys can handle that and the dual-secondary nuke at the same time?"

Drew turned towards Shego. "You'd be surprised how quickly my team works… when you provide the right motivators."

Shego looked at a directory on the wall. "Hey, Dr. D. Do you want to go get lunch?"

The steak was excellent as always, and the outlet hadn't skimped on the fries.

Drew made conversation between sips of iced yin-yang – a sweet blend of coffee, milk, and red tea.

"You know, Shego, the war last year really kicked Space Warfare Development Command in the pants. They're coming up with a parade of new weapons and equipment they want developed and deployed. With budgets as loose as they are now, everyone has contracts coming their way. And with CYCLOPEAN under our belts, my lab is perfectly positioned to take maximum advantage of the coming bonanza. With the funding we'll get, I will be able to create wonders of technology never before seen in the history of mankind!"

Dr. Lipsky broke into maniacal cackling. Shego rolled her eyes, and waited for him to stop.

"The Air Force is really taking this 'fighting the next space war' thing seriously, huh?"

"Not the Air Force, Shego. The Space Operations Group. There's a lot of talk among the brass of spinning it out into a separate service. They're still torn between Star Navy, Space Navy, and Space Force."

Shego sarcastically ticked off the options.

"Hmmm… pompus, childish, and boring. Not much of a choice, isn't it?"

"Star Navy - Xingjun - sounds best in Chinese. I think they'll keep it regardless of what English name they pick."

They both chuckled. Drew fell silent. "Huh. Star Navy. Do you think they'll ever change it to just 'Navy'?"

"Maybe when we have colonies across the galaxy. Or maybe when their budget gets bigger than the Navy's."

Drew was lost in thought.

"Uh… Dr. D? You okay?"

"Just thinking about the wars to come…"

"Relax. You're a scientist. Leave the strategizing about the next space war to the generals or admirals or whatever, and when the next one breaks out, don't insist on personally inspecting your pet project to satisfy your oversized ego."

Drew completely missed Shego's crack.

"No, no, no. I'm not thinking about the next space war. I'm thinking about the last space war."

"The last space war?"

Drew placed his hands together, and turned towards Shego.

"Are you familiar with the Fermi Paradox?"

"No."

Drew sighed.

"According to our best estimates, aliens should be everywhere. However, we do not see any. Thus we have a paradox."

"Why the heck should aliens be everywhere?"

Drew cleared his throat, and began a long monologue.

"Assumption One: The galaxy has a hundred billion stars, nearly all with planets, and is three times older than Earth. It seems vanishingly unlikely that mankind is the only tool-using civilization to have ever arisen in the galaxy."

"Assumption Two: If interstellar colonization is possible, the galaxy can be fully colonized in few million years - a geological blink of an eye. This is true even if you only have slower-than-light ships going no faster than a big nuclear pulse ship, and miniscule population growth rates. Behold the power of compound interest, Shego. At current population growth rates, in a thousand years – a mere three dynasties – our population will be in the hundreds of trillions."

"Assumption Three: We have not seen, heard, or found any aliens, their stuff, or their trash, even though according to the previous assumptions, Earth should have been colonized many times over. We know aliens can leave lots of trash. Terrestrial bacteria have already escaped our habitats from Mercury to Callisto. It's an assumption because who the heck knows what USS or ONI might be hiding."

Shego glared at Drew, who chuckled at the obvious falsehood. USS and ONI would have gone public with the discovery, and milked the discovery for every last drop of political capital they could get. Heck, the scientific-industrial complex would have been unstoppable in the quest to obtain that secret information.

"Conclusion: Either one of the assumptions is incorrect, or there is something else preventing the establishment of pan-galactic civilization. Some people say there's a Great Filter – maybe nearly all technological civilizations wipe themselves out by war or environmental degradation, or intelligent life really is that rare. Perhaps interstellar colonization really is impossible. We'll find out more when Project Starshot launches in a decade or two."

"Sounds good to me. We nearly blew ourselves back to the stone age just last year."

Drew frowned. "I don't like filters. As they say, it only takes one species to get past that filter, and the whole galaxy is conquered in a blink of a geological eye." He narrowed his eyes, and stared off into the distance. "

"My money's on equilibrium scenarios."

"Equilibrium what?"

"Equilibrium scenarios hold that the galaxy is nearly always empty. It's filled with expanding civilizations, but these can never conquer large chunks of the galaxy because of some self-correcting process."

Drew began ticking off his fingers.

"The Beserker hypothesis: the Galaxy is populated by self-replicating killing machines that destroy all emergent civilizations, and make perpetual war on each other. Remember, it just takes one early-developing civilization to manufacture such devices to fill the galaxy with self-perpetuating death in the blink of an eye."

"The dark forest hypothesis: the myriad civilizations of the Galaxy constantly hide from and destroy each other with relativistic weapons or giant lasers out of paranoid fear of each other. Lumps of rock moving at nearly the speed of light are near-impossible to spot… or stop.

"The Malthusian hypothesis: the great hand of Malthus inevitably leads to societal collapse, as exponentially increasing populations grow faster than civilizations can expand their holdings at the limited speed of light. Remember compound interest? In six Chinese dynasties, the population will number in the quintillions, and the nearest hundred star systems will all be out of room."

"What can our military do against those?"

"Oh, very little. In the last one, the military is part of the problem – life itself, struggling under the limited to growth imposed by the speed of light. In the other two, the military is overwhelmed by superior force, and everyone dies."

They fell silent, and Shego felt a shiver run down her spine.

"It's all highly speculative, of course. More science fiction than long-range planning."

The shiver came again. Shego exhaled sharply.

"Last space war, huh?"

Drew nodded.

 **END**

* * *

 _Author's note:_

 _Thank you for reading The First Space War. I hope you found this fan-fiction interesting, and took away some new ideas. Feel free to comment and review._

 _History marches on! The story continues in the Butterfly Effect series and other possible future works._

 _Science is Awesome!_

 _DrCyrusBortel_


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